Design Decisions #3: A design review!

In this episode we watch an actual design review. I catch up with Jonas about a new Basecamp 3 feature he's working on. We look at it for the first time together, share some thoughts, and even come up with a potential new name!

[@bsevo]

Wow, it is so great to see how you work.. every new thing that you make, a book or a podcast you go to the next level.. thank you for all of that! For showing how you work and how good and effective can it be! :)

[@andreiafscosta]

What happens after this call? Is any of this documented? When will the rest of the team get insights from the conclusions? How does that work (being remote)? Tk you for sharing this!

[@bryansebastian5930]

Holy Shit… if/when Hill Charts hits the public I'm whipping out the credit card and going for a full paid annual subscription! Love the insight on how discussions go for building out new features.

[@MachoMaster]

It was nice to see your face all the time, instead of staring at the same page for 20 minutes. Please keep your face there in the future as well. :-) About the feature itself. Here are my opinions/suggestions: 1. (in addition to a border you discussed,) boosts under the article should also have indent. That's what is basically going on anyways with comment-boosts (they are indented in comparison with the comment-writer profile picture). 2. I think that at least for article-boosts, the button and boosts should align to the right side. The newest boost should appear on the right side as well, pushing older boosts to the left (until the indent). My logic is that "boosts = article likes/shares" (to FB, twitter) in normal web pages. They are important (from marketing point of view), but not so important as to give them the same space and importance as the actual content (the article or the comments). So they have to be there in case they are needed, but shouldn't take the central (too much) space and view. Quite often, and this is what I suggest you do too with boosts, those kind of buttons and information are put to the right side below the article. 3. Did you think already what to do in cases with a lot of boosts? Space concerns. 4. A few visual ideas for boost buttons: mouth; teeth; lips; one of three previous with a speaking bubble; one of three sideways with exclamation mark; arrow going to up-right corner in exponential fashion; plus sign but with more boosting visuals (like sparks pushing the plus sign up) 5. How to follow boosts. Maybe have a page where one can see all of my comments sorted by boosts (if my comment got a new boost, then this comment goes on top of the list; only to be moved by the next "boosted" comment).

[@yourcreditcheck]

This was great. I get invited to a Skype call to listen to Jason and Jonas talk about an unreleased Basecamp feature? Unreal. Keep it up!

[@StruC]

What about "blip"? Keeps the aliteration with Basecamp, doesn't imply intent but is quite clear about how short the message should be

[@hadiyousef]

Very insightful process. Fun observing Jason’s leadership.

[@RichardAllum]

How about React. I like Boost but react is what you're doing. Having said that, first reaction (see what I did there) is 🤔 I really like applause. It's one click and simple. This is comments on a comment and seems confusing.

[@RichardAllum]

Just listened to the Rework podcast on this and can see why you want to change it.

[@gettingreal8980]

"React" is not what we're going for. And we don't want people to choose from a set of predefined options or just +1 what someone else said. We want people to speak for themselves, and put in a little time to decide what to say. More on this soon. -JF

[@RichardAllum]

Getting Real makes sense. Thanks for replying.

[@JesseHanley]

I NEED HILL CHARTS IN MY LIFE.

Have you considered making this a subset of the upcoming(?) reply functionality? One concept I’ve been playing around for my own site is that of “quick comments”. I’m getting a lot of “Cool!”, “Looks great!” type of comments that don’t contribute much to the actual conversation. The idea is to display those shorter messages in a similar way as the whispers/boosts here. I haven’t figured out the right mechanism yet to determine whether something is a regular comment or a “quick comment” but it could possibly be automatic based on length. Additionally these short comments could just be emoji and people would also be able to +1 other people’s quick comments so you don’t get a bunch of the same emoji. (Although this aggregating might defeat the idea of your implementation).

[@RobertBloom]

Thank you for doing this series! It's great to get a glimpse at the way you think about things, iterate, and review. At first I was going to suggest "express" or "expressions" because they convey something shorter like react or reactions without already being known for just liking or emojis, or even "root for" to indicate more supportive. But boost is great, especially when considering that you could use it to bring more attention to something (like with mentions). One thing I thought of that might be something to consider, is that people might confuse boost with promoting something above other things, like boosting to promote one comment to the top of a comment list, but maybe that's not an issue since you can boost a lot of things and not just comments.

[@iliasidorenko7682]

Yeah, the name "react" makes much more sense. This feature looks like a combination of emoji reactions and threads from Slack, which makes it really fascinating! One addition which would be awesome i think is to be able to plus-one the same reaction that another person just made. If there's 👍 reaction, you should be able to click on it and it would add your face to the list of who added the reaction. Sorta like Slack reactions do. Not in the paradigm that basecamp works, but heck why not? Probably a sane limitation would be to only allow that for emojis. Saying "Thanks!" by just clicking a button would be weird. But maybe that's actually good, and a "Thanks!" from one person may prompt many more "Thanks!" from other passer-bys.

[@gettingreal8980]

"React" isn't what we want here. I'll share more of the thinking behind the idea in a future episode. -JF

[@MartinClausen]

Couldn't it just be called "Reactions"?

[@gettingreal8980]

Intentionally staying away from that word. "Reactions" suggest mindless knee-jerks - we want to run with something a bit more considered (or something that doesn't implicitly reference speed). -JF

[@MartinClausen]

JF, Thanks for your feedback. I don't think "Reaction" implies thoughtlessness or speed in the slightest, but then again I am Danish :-) How about "Reflection" or "Thought" :-)

[@mattydsmith]

Great watching this now the feature is live. Boosts is such a great name 👏

[@heliocorreia1814]

I love it, thanks for sharing

[@dixpac]

Great episode Y Maybe you could make this as reactions(similar to Github). You could present a few predefined emotional reactions, instead of having just one "applause", you can have 4-5 of them. Whispers concept feels too complex for me :)....if 30 people leave a "whisper" to the comment ...R'n'r :)

[@gettingreal8980]

Predefined responses is exactly what we want to avoid. We want people to be able to be fully expressive, and put a little effort into communication vs. just picking from a menu of choices and leaving "drive-by" communication. -JF

[@dixpac]

I agree. In my opinion, regular comments are enough. No whispers. No emojis. Not sure if fixing applause problem by introducing a new feature is a way to go. Maybe just killing applause is enough? Problem with current implementation of whispers is that they are basically replies to the comment, so I'm afraid that Message will look something like Slack threads. My two cents as a Basecamp user ;)

[@abdellah15k]

Great stuff, thanks for sharing. For the icon, you could go with a little bird singing 🐦𝄞 or whispering (all i could make with emojis) . This would be analog to a tweet which is the closest thing in my mind to this as it's also a short message.

[@abdellah15k]

Boost is a great name, and a little bird whispering some magic would do the trick 🐦✨

[@abdellah15k]

and the sound on submit ✨𝄞 would play well

[@TagCharlie]

maybe you can try Zoom next time instead of Skype.

[@gettingreal8980]

Used Zoom in Episode 4! Check it out. -JF

[@BrandonSchoenberger]

I like the boost. Crazy idea: Only the individual you are boosting can see these. Less noise for everyone else and more personal for the person you are boosting. Could help the issue of people feeling bad when one item gets a lot of boosts, but their item doesn’t. Just a thought.

[@gettingreal8980]

The fun is in seeing them pile up. Seeing what others do and then playing off them. It's a big part of the fun. We launched this internally today and it's been really fun playing together vs. playing quietly in the corner. -JF

[@BrandonSchoenberger]

Getting Real - Excited to see it in action and see how you land on the notifications. Thank you for allowing us to peek behind the curtain and see your process at Basecamp.

[@dpetrie0]

Boost!

[@chrickso]

lost your Airpods?

[@gettingreal8980]

They've been occasionally clicking static while recording, so tossed them. Cords are more reliable. -JF