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Why do you use 37Signals products? Simplicity, UI, Hype?

18 points by rmalik ↗ HN
After watching various videos and seeing the growth of 37 Signals, it makes me curious why people use their applications. They clearly have less features and I don't see that as a large issue. Since they are mostly designers you would expect the UI/UX to be good. Finally I'm sure that some just jumped on their products because of the RoR hype. So if you use a 37 Signals product, why do you continue to use it?

27 comments

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rrival
I've been using Basecamp since 2005 - simple, responsive UI, stable.

If you haven't read their manifesto on keeping things simple, you should - the 'lack' of features is intentional.

rmalik
thanks rrival, i actually own the 'getting real' book and have a fairly good understanding of how their philosophy affects the outcome of their products. i especially like the mindset when your developing a web application of asking yourself 'would i pay for this product?'.
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Nekojoe
I like the simplicity and minimalism I don't have to spend time learning another interface as theirs is stripped down and minimalist.

It's also easy for me to use with less technical people. As it's not overwhelming unlike some similar tools, they can start using Basecamp straight away. I don't have to sit down and give them a walk through.

I also like how it's flexible. I don't have to adjust my workflow to their software.

djcjr
If you're so curious, perhaps your time would be better spent actually trying their applications, rather than "watching various videos and seeing the growth".
axod
I didn't read the OP's question as hostile, or suggesting their applications are rubbish. I think it's a valid question - clearly some people are willing to pay money for inferior products, because they value other things. Trust? support? name brand? Love RoR and want to support people using RoR?

Analysing what those things are seems a good idea if you're trying to emulate it, and you can't do that by "Trying the app yourself". The best way, as the OP has done, is ask customers why they pay for it.

I have tried Campfire, and I'm still not quite sure why people pay for it. I think you can take simplicity too far personally. It could be replicated on a weekend (As was done at google with huddlechat) so I don't see the value proposition there. I haven't tried basecamp so maybe that's more complex.

trevorturk
Just because _you_ can replicate something on a weekend doesn't mean other people can (or want to).
rmalik
thanks axod! I feel like this is a valid forum to ask this question. I think some of their products can be emulated quickly in feature sets but it usually is their design and user experience that sets them apart. also i believe their audience is either small businesses (fortune 5,000,000 :D) that don't have resources or ones that would rather not allocate the resources to develop similar solutions.
spanktheuser
You make a good argument that follows logically from your initial assumption - that "clearly some people are willing to pay money for inferior products." So I'll just challenge that assumption ;-) By and large, I think you and the OP are defining inferior products as synonymous with less fully featured products. But it's not that simple (witness the iPhone, still lacking cut & paste).

For example, compare Highrise with Salesforce. My company (a 50 person consulting firm) is moving away from SF to HR right now, even though SF has many, many more features. Why? Because HR has all of the features we need, and most of the features we like (but don't absolutely require). And we are much, much more productive when using HR. It's easier to use. I don't have to think much when filling in information. The reports take me about 5 seconds to read and comprehend. This time savings is very valuable to me and my company - I've got better things to do than think about how to use a CRM application. The features Salesforce possesses that HR lacks, by contrast, don't have any value.

You'll get it if you just look at things through a slightly different lens. You might be getting tripped up by the confusion of effort and size with value. Value is what software has to a customer - effort is the cost software has to developers. And size is just a number. It would be nice if these three number always correlated. But unfortunately, that isn't the case.

axod
I'd say a sure fire signal that it's inferior is if it can be replicated by someone else easily. If so, they can replicate it, then improve it - making the original inferior.

The iPhone looks extremely simple. But it's a ruse - it's actually massively complex and a feat of engineering. It's hard to copy.

I agree, it takes a lot of thought to decide what to leave out - lack of features can be a good thing. But those decisions are not really defendable in terms of IP (Unless you complain Huddlechat 'stole' your whole UI and they roll over)

I haven't used basecamp or highrise extensively, so perhaps they make up for campfire.

rmalik
I am not stating that 37 Signals products are inferior at all. The classical mindset was that people would move from one product to another because of some killer feature or low cost alternative. 37Signals has seemed to flip this idea and challenge the idea of what better software means. This brought me to wonder how other users felt about their products and their motivations for using them. I like your distinction between effort and value. I don't agree at all with the notion of the amount of effort put in equals the amount of value to the user. It simply doesn't work in reality. The effort is also a vague concept as it could be related to development time, marketing, customer service, etc. Effort in dealing with users, gathering feedback and iterating on the product based on that feedback is what gains value for a product IMHO.
crux
Campfire's just-work quotient is pretty high. As someone who's got his own web hosting, I was casting around for a hostable Campfire-workalike and there was nothing that I could find to compare. I also know some folks who have developed a very similar system as a part of their larger product and I hear enough of their bitching to know that there is some degree of skill in getting things to be 37S-level smooth.
rmalik
I am already a Basecamp user and am happy with how it's worked for my startup in the past. I know why I use the software but I wanted to understand other customers motivation. Thanks for the advice though.
themanual
Simplicity and excellent usuable UI design. And ofcourse the RoR hype helps a little
generalk
My company uses Basecamp to manage projects. It's the only project management tool we've stuck with over five years of experimentation.

I have to attribute this to Basecamp's simplicity: it doesn't do a lot of the things we want, but we can fake it for the most part. Instead of prescribing how we should be managing our projects, Basecamp takes as little information as possible and lets us decide how to use it.

So, basically, we use it because it solves problems we need solved. Same reason we use anything else.

jermy
It (Basecamp) is simple enough that our clients can use it. Enough said.
tjogin
We use Basecamp and Highrise because I haven't seen anything better. And by better I don't mean "has more features".

The products are simple and obvious in their nature. That is why we use them.

zavulon
Less features than what? You criticize their products, yet offer no viable alternative. A better question would be "why do you use X instead of Y", where X is a particular 37 signals product, and Y is an alternative that you like better.

Personally, I use Backpack after trying (and not liking) a whole bunch of other solutions for todo lists. I tried

- Outlook

- Pen and paper

- Simple text file

- Command line todo tool (Lifehacker)

- Remember the milk

- Google tasks

and I'm probably forgetting something, it's been a while.

I use Backpack because it's:

- Incredibly simple and intuitive to use

- Offers organization system that makes sense (pages, notes and lists - I use nothing else)

- It's easy and fast to find anything I want

- I can use it everywhere - on my phone, desktop, and the web. I use the web-based client at work and at home, also Mac desktop widget at home, and Satchel on my iPhone. The synching is seamless everywhere.

I'm not going to dignify the "RoR hype" with a response.

rmalik
I did not offer an alternative because I expect that existing customers are already familiar with them and have made their decision to pay for their software logically. I also was talking about their set of products and how the philosophy ('getting real') of their company influences the characteristics of their web applications (less features, interface first, monthly charges, etc.). Thanks for the reasons you use Basecamp, I found them quite useful and succinct. If you were offended by the 'RoR hype' statement, I'm sorry. It just comes to my attention that with the origin of RoR being at 37 signals that they probably get a fair amount of traffic from those who are dedicated to the framework and I'm sure some of those visitors convert to customers...i'm just not sure how much :)
mattjung
Because 1) the product is good enough for my needs and 2) because I know them and 3) I expect them to still be there in 5 years. There are probably tons of other similar products out there with the same simplicity and reliability (or even better), but why would I want to change to something that is not extremely better?
tptacek
The minimalism and design sensibility is nice, but the real reason we use them is that they're (a) hosted and (b) a reliable, proven company. You could launch a 10x better Basecamp or Campfire, but I don't believe you're going to be in business a year from now, so I'll stick with 37s.
wallflower
I looked at LiquidPlanner and Wrike recently in a comparison of Basecamp. They are nice products but they make things complicated. In my opinion, Basecamp is excellent for working with multiple clients/stakeholders on small, self-contained projects.

For collaborating on projects with clients, 37S makes a product that has limitations but the overall user experience makes it better than their competitors.

LP and Wrike both share serious access/security flaws (LiquidPlanner grants global access to anyone who is shared a workspace (clients,projects,folders) and Wrike allows anyone who is shared a virtual project folder to go on and share it with anyone - (who can easily delete the entire virtual project folder and all its children). These open, Web 2.0 collaborative ideals don't work well with a company focused on multiple client projects (all of which must be confidential).

ziadbc
I think the reason is all the things you mentioned, and more.

Most of the other project management software still seems sterile, and you have no sense of who is creating it. As far as features go, if everyone on a team isn't using a feature, that feature doesn't exist anyway.

With the high profile of 37signals team, you get a sense that if anything was drastically wrong with the software, the user base will be able to hunt down Jason Fried and get the thing working again. If they're not gonna fix it, Jason Fried will be the first person to say so.

Thats straightforward, and people use straightforward as a proxy for 'good.'

dugmartin
I'm not a big Basecamp fan - I'm forced to use it for work where we have 40+ projects running on it and sometimes for larger clients when they have their own Basecamp setup.

Maybe we don't use it to its fullest but all it ends up doing is archiving conversation threads and being a file repository. Just looking now there are 3 month late todo items that I don't think will ever get closed. After a while every project seems to drift off of it and end up using a combination of email + bug tracking.

rmalik
So are you not a fan of it because it isn't used properly at your company or that it doesn't fulfill your needs?
RossM
I use Highrise (free version) for task management, although since that's all I use it for I'm working towards shifting those to Google Mail/Calendar Tasks. I do however like the fact you can get some of the task/reminder feeds in Backpack and Highrise as iCalendar feeds - not enough applications use this.

As far as my experience with the apps has gone they're nice, and they do work well, but I don't believe they're worth the hype. It might be that I haven't seen enough "bad" software but I've seen simpler web apps that work just as well.