37signals recently shipped Basecamp 5, which force-upgraded all their current customers from Basecamp 4. And it's not good.

It pains me to write this, because we're actually huge fans of 37signals, DHH and Basecamp! We built our own SaaS on Ruby on Rails. Hell, this blog you're reading is built on Rails! As a company, we've attended Rails World.. twice! And 95% of the time, I find myself agreeing and silently nodding when I read about Jason Fried's and DHH's opinions, especially DHH's recent pushes for Rails simplification (SQLite, Solid stack, etc.) and Linux. Awesome stuff.

But I don't agree with everything, let's say 5% of the time, and unfortunately I feel like most of the Basecamp 5 design decisions fall into that "5% bucket". On Twitter / X, the Basecamp 5 "feedback" tended to be quite polarized and inflammatory (as so often on X). In contrast to that, here, I'll try to convey my points a bit more rationally and calmly. Let's take a look.

Here's how the Basecamp 5 home screen looks:

Like, dude, what the hell is up with that? (So much for staying calm and rational)

I feel like any company using Basecamp 5 with more than ~10 projects now feels like they're sitting in a European stone castle - remember those castles which have those arrowslits where castle defenders would stick their bow and arrow through? The projects grid view feels like that. It's super slim and.. invites you to scroll? At the same time, there's ample screen real estate on the left and right side, and it just goes unused.

We spend a lot of our time in Basecamp chats (or "Campfires", as they're called).
Here's how a typical view looks:

Font sizes
There are a few big problems here. First off, what's up with the font size? The chat messages are huge. On my 16" MacBook, I can see.. 4 messages. Having to do lots of IT support for old people (a.k.a. my parents), I usually only encounter these sort of "misconfigured" font sizes on smartphones owned by the older generation, but not within a modern SaaS used by tech companies.

And, sure, you could make the point that large font sizes can be good because they aid readability, but.. no, you couldn't even make that point here, because the other fonts are, relatively speaking, much smaller, notably the "New for you" menu which pops up on the right side by clicking on it in the bottom right corner.

I tried "fixing" this by manually setting my Chrome font size to 80% for Basecamp, but that makes the aforementioned other text really, really small.

Something's just really off here.

Home button
Next, I often want to go to the Home Screen. But the Home link is 1) tiny and 2) stashed away in the far-most corner of my screen, in the top left corner. It's super difficult to reach.

Why?

Okay, now you could make the point that Basecamp 5 wants to nudge its users towards using more keyboard shortcuts, just like DHH currently does with Linux. The first problem was that I didn't even know those existed until I saw an X post by DHH demoing them. Okay. Sure, they be mentioned on X, in the user manual, and also in some of the Basecamp 5 webinars / videos coming out right now, but.. your average user is not on X, doesn't read the user manual and doesn't attend webinars. They just start using the damn thing (tm) and get on with their lives. Software needs to be intuitive. Basecamp 5 is not.

But let's take the working assumption that I am wrong (I might also not be an average user) and that we need to learn the keyboard shortcuts to use Basecamp 5 properly.

In simplified terms, the thing with keyboard shortcuts on Linux is that they always work. If you're, say, in htop, you always know that hitting certain keys is going to cause certain things to happen.

This is not true in Basecamp 5.

I've been trying to toggle the right "New for you" bar with its shortcut Shift+S. Initially, this feels very cool, because it gives you the feeling that this is almost like snappy desktop-grade software (Basecamp 5 is fast!). But the problem is that it simply doesn't work on many screens:

Like, sure, I can just hit Escape on those pages to defocus the text input, and then hit Shift+S. But should I even be dealing with the mental overhead of wondering which screen I am on (is it the home screen or a campfire?) before hitting a keyboard shortcut? Or should I extend my muscle memory to always mash Escape a couple times before hitting a keyboard shortcut on Basecamp 5, so that I can defocus any "stray" text inputs? Both of these approaches sounds terrible.

So yeah, those are my biggest gripes with Basecamp 5.

What's next?

I don't know. I did, on purpose, give Basecamp 5 (and myself) some time before writing up my thoughts. I thought I'd get used to it, or that I'm "just holding it wrong", like the iPhone 4 back in the day. Maybe I still will.

But so far, it really feels like a step backwards.

One interesting thought experiment is to speculate about the processes and thoughts which led to this design. I feel that, respectfully, a competent UI/UX designer would have not made such decisions. So it's possible that these ideas came from the top, and might have been implemented against the resistance of other designers on the team.

37signals famously prefers to decide by "taste" and less by user feedback and a/b tests. Maybe their taste has atrophied over time. Back in the day, 37signals still was a web dev agency and knew how a "normal", profitable company might use project management software. Nowadays, theoretically, 37signals could just drop everything and still see solid subscription revenue come in to 5-10 years, given their product stickiness and loyal customer base. But this also means that they might be even further away from understanding a "normal" company.

Then again, being not "normal" has served them well in the past - they got things right by having "non-normal" opinions on not to raise VC, being profitable, staying small, etc.; maybe now, with Basecamp 5, we're seeing the first instance of them getting their "non-normal" opinions wrong?