OKCOOL

It’s easy to criticise and find fault with almost any web site on the Internet. The design is wrong, the information isn’t organised correctly, the code is poor. There are no shortage of areas in which to mount an attack. However, when a product does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s quite difficult to be constructive about your thoughts. The web site whybasecampsux.org is a perfect example of just this.

I object to the way whybasecampsux.org has been put together quite strongly because it puts more effort in to attacking 37signals and Jason Fried than it actually does in evaluating the product and making useful criticism. The irony of it is, if you read their site, it’s almost a perfect example of why a company might ignore the requests of their users’!

Anyone that spends time in the same office as me will tell you that I’m not a massive fan of basecamp. That doesn’t stop me using it on an daily basis. Why? Because it’s the best solution for our needs right now. This is a major factor in why whybasecampsux.org is so far off the mark. It doesn’t acknowledge the purpose of basecamp, which is to provide simple collaboration between teams on a project whilst providing a very shallow learning curve. We can, and do, give all of our clients access to the projects we work on so that they can join in. Although all of our customers are of course very savvy :), I don’t think either Mark or I have had to provide ‘support’ to them when it comes to using basecamp. Surely this is enough of a reason in its own right to endorse it?

Top 5 Reasons whybasecampsux.org is full of shit:

(this list hasn’t been thought out very well – if you don’t realise that’s the point…. move along!)

1. It says ‘sux’ far too much. Is this the agile alternative for a word?
2. It’s a blatant attempt to obtain internet traffic (oops – guess I’ve sent some their way).
3. It’s used the basecamp logo. I’m sure they don’t have permission to do this.
4. The author seems to be selling product evaluation services! If his evaluations are thought out as well as his basecamp one is, I’m guessing he’s going hungry.
5. Under ‘alternatives to basecamp’ it mentions activeCollab which, last time I checked, is a pretty good copy of basecamp.
6. He only seems to attack 37signals. If you don’t like a supplier, change. There’s no need to slate the product though.

How can basecamp improve?

From my experience of using basecamp, customers seem to just follow on a message thread whenever they want to say something. This gives little or no context to a lot of discussions. Here are my suggestions to improve messaging:

• Allow personal tagging so that I can add my own context to a discussion (this could apply to a number of things).
• Allow an admin to close a discussion with a link that says ‘Start a new topic’ where the message box would normally be.

Before I wrote this, I asked Keir what annoys him most about the product (as I know he has certain sticking points with it). His response was “why can’t I associate messages with to do list items”. I totally agree with this one. The messaging is what our customers use more than anything, and it would be nice if I could assign them contextual ‘to do’ items based on a discussion. E.g. Topic ‘Need design elements for page x’, Message ‘Please provide me the following items:’ To do items ‘Provide A, B, C etc’. It would also then be very helpful if you could get to the relevant message from the to do list.

I’m not going to add any more. Hopefully, our suggestions will come across as short, sweet, and well considered.

The fact that you can try basecamp for free for 30 days means there’s little or no reason to see if it meets your requirements for yourself.