Griping: It's not just for World Usability Day anymore! 1
Here at 12 Spokes, we’re big fans of 37signals and their products. We use Basecamp, Campfire, and Backpack (not to mention the ur-product, Rails), for both work and play. We think they have a lot of good ideas for making websites great. They advocate user-centered design, thoughtful design, all the good stuff.
But today, their design really let me down. I’m calculating our company’s budget for the next year, and I remembered 37s blogging about paying for Basecamp in advance. It would be easier to crunch our numbers if I could pay it once every year and be done with it.
Since I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d read about pre-paying, I decided to check out Basecamp’s home page to find billing information. I was greeted by a page that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, filled with acres of text. It has almost no conventional navigation; instead, the page is peppered (liberally) with blue inline links like “even looks great on paper,” “more buzz,” and “read our manifesto.” I was looking for a FAQ, so I looked in the places where FAQ links usually live.: At the top right of the page I found just a logo; At the bottom of the page (after a bunch of scrolling) I found a link called “Questions?” which I thought might mean “Frequently asked questions,” but it opened my email app. Ahh: when they say “Questions?” they mean “Contact us.”
I finally found the link to a FAQ. It is buried two-thirds down the screen, embedded in a section titled “Can we try it before we have to pay for it? What about refunds?” I follow the FAQ link and was relieved. It delivered me to a page with actual navigation! Aha! There’s the link called “membership/billing”! This is what I’m looking for!
It took me two or three minutes to find what I was looking for. Even funnier, once I’d found the FAQ, I decided to blog about my adventure, and I had to go through the whole thing again, because I couldn’t remember where (among all that damned blue text) I’d found the FAQ link!
The bottom line: Like Steve Krug preaches, we have web conventions for a reason. When you dismantle those conventions, usability suffers. No matter how many yellow highlights or yellow fades you use, no matter how “clean” your design.
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When I read Erin’s post, I realized that her method of looking for that information differed from how I would go about it. I would have clicked on the ‘Account’ tab from within Basecamp. I tried this and sure enough, there is a section pretty high on the page about paying in a lump sum. The reason Erin couldn’t see it, was because she wasn’t the Administrator for this account.
So, to be fair, they do make it pretty easy to find for account admins, but if other people start hunting around for information like this, it sounds like quite the mountain to climb.