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My favorite posts from this blog are the ones that show this kind of stuff. The “How To’s” or the design processes.

Thanks for sharing.

Poncho?

Well done guys. I really love the screencasts – it makes the presentation very personal.

Interesting that you chose to simply crop long project names instead of going to a ”...” after so many characters. I always thought it looked odd to have half a character at the end of a line of text.

Keep up the great work guys!

Nice work and thanks for sharing the design process. I wonder what the % breakdown is of people switching between their let’s say 5 most recent projects and other projects in their list.

I agree. These blog posts are brill :) It’s amazing to see the thought processes behind elegant features.

I was so inspired by this post I even blogged about it :) [http://www.tobinharris.com/2008/4/16/features-need-love-too]

Cool to see that you addressed one of the only really ugly bits in basecamp :)

great result!

I love the new feature and really appreciate your effort to explain your design decision. That being said after using the feature for a few days I find I am constantly annoyed by the popup. My mouse tends to travel to who knows where when I start reading so the popup ends up popping over what I am reading.

I still love the feature but wish it was a opt-in thing. So if I click “Switch to a Different Project” I get the popup. If I just mouse over the area it doesn’t popup.

Thanks for sharing your thought process in these posts. It’s great that you put so much thinking into these details. I’ve got to be honest, though… I’m not a big fan of this update for two reasons:

First, it forces me to think. The order of the list constantly changes so I’m constantly having to look, read, and think. I used the old switcher primarily when a client called me with a question. In one click, without any thinking or reading, I could jump to the project the client was calling about. True, there’s still the “Other recently accessed projects” drop down, but I don’t get there until I’ve read through the list to see if the one I’m looking for is there.

Second, I always categorize things as client first and project second. Your design does the opposite. I understand that for you guys, the client is always the same so listing it first wouldn’t be very useful. But for us (and I assume many services firms), we often have projects with very similar names, like “email campaign”, for many different clients. Emphasizing the project name first only adds to the need to stop, read, and think.

This might not be the right place for this, but as long as we’re talking about the design details I thought I’d throw them into the discussion.

Didn’t you guys forgot to add a link to “All your projects”?. I mean, the list is only for the most recently assessed ones.

Just as we were starting to get rid of multi-level menus in some desktop apps they rear their ugly head together with constantly changing “frequently used” lists. Ms Office dynamic menus at their worst. And in top of the line web apps. Sorry to see that happen.

(Don’t take this the wrong way. I love Your work I just think this is a major usability mistake):

@Aaron:

I’m like you, Aaron. I have a lot of different clients. In fact, I put the client’s name at the beginning of the project so I could click on the list, type the first couple letters of the client and it would select their project so I could hit enter and jump to it.

This kinda breaks that workflow.

That said, I like it. I still click on it when I move my mouse up there, as I haven’t unlearned the old way yet.

I like the design concept, but what is killing me is the hover action versus the click action.

The issue with hover effects is that they appear regardless of a user’s intention. I realize hovering and getting something magical to pop up is the status quo, but things are starting to get silly. I can’t check my Gmail account without twelve contact info boxes popping up; I can’t even look at MSNBC without a submenu that’s half as large as the page covering anything I was attempting to read.

The “click” is where it’s at. The click says, “I want something to happen.” The hover is getting beat up.

Like many others, I also don’t like that the menu appears on hover-over. Its has inadvertently popped up enough now to be annoying.

I love that you share this kind of information. I learn so much from seeing how others achieve their end goal, even for a small feature like this. I’m still getting used to it, but sharing the design process really helps me appreciate it. I was also surprised by how much increasing the target area around the header links helped the efficiency of my navigation within Basecamp. Thanks for sharing!

Jason,

Love the improvements here.

Thanks again for the great interview together last month.

Aside question-what program did you utilize to screencast this video?

Matthew Scott

I just love these “Design Decisions” they are your best posts by far! Keep it up!

FYI , we changed the switcher to be activated on-click instead of on-hover.

Thanks! I was hoping you guys would do the right thing. ;)

“Also worth noting is that it took an extra day or two to get this working in IE 6 /7. And then a few more hours post launch to deal with some lingering IE issues.”

It boggles the mind just how many hours designers and developers pour into just getting IE to “obey” standards with the rest of them.

We should pool resources and through a Union sue Microsofty for such a monumental drain of time, money and resources their browsers have afflicted upon us!