Bitching about Basecamp
17 Jun 2010
I’ve been a rapid Getting Real, Rework, Ruby On Rails, and overall 37 Signals fanboy for a long time. But I’ll tell you something — I’ve never used their products (other than rails) until now.
Recently, I’ve been working with a project with a couple of overseas teams, and the project manager uses Basecamp. There are a number of things it does well: it organizes for you, handles email updates to tasks, handles attachments well. But there are a shocking number of things that it doesn’t do, or does poorly. Maybe the product is better suited for designers or a design shop (me being a developer and all), but it just seems like there are holes here. I understand the 37-signals philosophy (and trust me, if you work in my office, you’ve heard me spout it enough), but these are a few things that I just don’t get.
No time estimates
There is no place for adding a time estimate for a task, only a due date. This doesn’t work at all for any complex project - dates are meaningless, especially since stuff is always late, and the dates are always shifting. Time estimates (or points or jelly beans or whatever in the SCRUM world) are also going to be wrong, but at least they allow you to communicate that this work is more expensive (will take longer) than this other work. Pretty important communication point for Task-owners and Task-definers.
Tasks have no correlation to Milestones
Maybe I’m missing something here, but if tasks can’t be assigned to a Milestone, then how do you know your progress on reaching that Milestone. I might just be missing how to do this, but I’m not sure.
You can’t change To-Do details on the Comment page
This is more of an interface miss to be, but I find that after discussing that item, I sometimes need to change the details. Not having a way to change the details on this page (or even a direct link), means I have to go back and visually search the To-do list. This can take a bit of time, and get frustrating if you do this a lot.
Too much Drag & Drop
This is a bit more of a usability nit, but I find that drag and drop can sometimes be difficult to use. If you start re-ordering items you have to drag and hold and it can be time consuming. It’s good in some cases, but it would be easier in many cases to have “Move up/Move down" arrows (since those tend to be common use cases). Also, the entire bar should be draggable (rather than just a “handle"). The hover-handle usually means a bunch of extra mouse movements to make it show up, then you have to move back to get it to move, then drag. That’s a lot of work for a quick change.
Why 6 categories of messages?
The six categories of messages are “Assets", “Copywriting", “Design", “Development", “Miscellaneous", and “Transcripts". This might be because I’m not an admin, but why these six? What if I was a construction company? Or a lawyer? Or an accountant? I’m not saying that you should let users go hog wild and create 100 categories, but at least letting them rename them or customize them, they might be more useful to non-design shop (or even different design-shops).