Basecamp Next: UI Preview

The new "sheets" UI paradigm is strange to me. Jason mentioned a few times that they wanted to provide focus by getting rid of unnecessary design elements and chrome. But with the sheets, you actually get unneeded chrome. Your main content viewport keeps getting shifted down and to the right.<p>Why not just use breadcrumbs at the top to provide context? That way, the entire content area could be taken over whenever you click on a link which would be much simpler.

Is this just me or did somebody else think they overpresent some of the features? Take 3:20, "I can just click the Todo's link and a sheet pops over the project" - yeah sure that's cool, but that's just really what I expected, it would have been ridiculous not to have a list view of all todos! It gets even better at 3:42 - "now if I can want to dive into a specific to do item, I can just click on that to do item and look at the item, and go back to the project. No need to go to the list first" - again, isn't that just an obvious principle you'd expect any decently designed web app to follow? Yes, 37signals has nice designs and the new design looks sleek. The sheets are also a cool idea and catch up looks useful, but this ridiculous overemphasizing of completely normal "features" makes them look a bit stuck up to me. The feature set is also still pretty sparse for $49/month but that is an entirely different topic (and apparently hasn't really bothered users too much in the past)

I'm very pleasantly surprised by this. I've always been a bit cynical about Basecamp's success, but I think this new version is going to be a genuine game-changer.<p>I really love the sheets idea and I'll love seeing how it works out. I'm already thinking about how I could apply the idea to e-commerce sites, hopefully the interaction isn't patented.<p>Thinking about it now, I am wondering about a potential limitation. Sheets make sense when you have a fairly consistent starting point, ie the project overview page. But what if you're given a link to say an individual ticket? Do the sheets build up from that ticket as a starting point, rather than the project page, or do they reflect the hierarchy of the site? If it's the later, does that not mean that loading a deep page in the site is burdened by having to also load its parent pages? I assume it would be handled asynchronously, but it still seems like a lot of overhead.

Really, really dig the new sheets UI. If anything is going to be "stolen" from BCX, it'll be sheets. It seems odd, but only because we're so used to traversing views. Another big lesson is that the UI itself is feather light (the restraint is impressive). Excited to play with this, wish I had an invite now.

This looks like a great redesign overall. I'm still not entirely sold on how sheets are any better than breadcrumbs, other than being a different UX implementation of the same concept. But I'll adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Playing around with it is definitely needed for something like this.<p>The one thing I will say though: every link better be "openable" in a new tab. While I love that you're helping me focus on one thing on the page, we're multitasking beasts at heart. If I can't Cmd-Click anything in that interface I'm going to be quite disappointed. But if you're using HTML5's pushState I'm assuming you have that already taken care of ;)

I love the concept (and the speed, my <i>God!</i>) but one thing that really bugs me is the to-do list area -- it seems as though it could use a similar treatment as the discussion area. The long line lengths plus the inconsistent comment badge locations make it look <i>really</i> tough to scan.

Nicely done. Very fast as well, never seen a webapp load that quick. Anyone with a bit of explanation on how this is done?

tl;dr: sheets are the greatest thing in the world, you just can't tell.<p>P.S. everyones favorite new word is skeuomorph

From that video, it looks like they're using the term "discussion" to refer to a single post/comment. Jason or DHH: is there a particular reason why that terminology made more sense for your product than something like "comment(s)"? Or am I misunderstanding, and a "discussion" is actually a collection of comments?

"We call it page stacking and we think you’re going to love it."<p>This sentence is sooo very apple.

Nice, I like it. It's a bit like 'dependency injection', but as an interface.<p>Because you know that every link will open a new sheet. And it won't bring you to somewhere completely different. Clicking a link can only show you information that was inherited somehow from the sheet you're watching.

This is an intriguing UI solution. If nothing else, it's ballsy to so radically revamp a flagship application. (I hope it doesn't receive the same reception as FCPX.)<p>One thing the demo left me wondering is what happens when a user opens a link to something that normally opens in a modal sheet? (if I send someone a url from my browser address bar, for instance.) Does a page load with a sheet overlaying the project homepage, or is there an alternate view for that case?<p>edit: I see this question was already answered by Jason: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601498" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601498</a>

I like the tactility of this a lot. Much superior to bread crumbs. Will the back button still work? Using pushstate I presume?<p>If so: then you have the best of both worlds. Advanced users can still open tabs, hit backspace to quickly navigate back (or 'up' in this case) — and regular users get a radically faster and more spatial way to navigate.

As JF said, you can't really fully judge the sheet UI idea until you see it in action for yourself. I'm one of those people who opens a new tab while using Basecamp for each item of interest. To me, these sheets could either <i>solve</i> that for me, or create an entirely new problem where it becomes jarring if I still prefer my old habits.<p>The one thing that stands out for me is how this effects the developers who work with the Basecamp API to bring the same experience to mobile, or other devices. I feel like developers who make a Basecamp app for iPhone, for example, are going to struggle trying to find a way to make these UI elements work the way they have been intended. And yes, developers <i>will</i> try to emulate it.<p>I'm reserving judgement, but for those working to bring an experience like the web-based version, I think there will be some long-game challenges. We'll see.

Looks like a fancier (HTML5) version of BackPack (another product from 37signals), instead of Basecamp.<p>Anyone else feel the same?<p>Basecamp Next no longer looks like a Project Management tool to me anymore, but instead - just a centralized/group info sharing app ... which is exactly what BackPack is today.

How would the architecture of basecamp next port over to the mobile web? It seems that the heavy caching and initial first hit downloading would potentially work well with mobile. Anyone want to take a stab at this?

This is real pretty. I love the stacked paper visual analogy of the 'focused' view in a project, it's so instantly visually apparent what's going on.<p>I wonder how many trends this UI/UX is going start.

I know it's a small thing, but I really just do not at all care for the round user avatars. They're distracting. They create too much movement on the page, when all I want to do is read text. Square avatars don't draw the eye away from the content nearly as much.<p>Edit: Can someone please explain to me why this was downvoted? I'm not complaining, if it was done for good reason, just curious. I'm not the world's most prolific HN user. If my tone came across as being too harsh, it wasn't intentional.

Very nice reuse of the concept pioneered by the Google Chrome preferences dialogs. Very nice because one directly see the inspiration, which means that it will not disturb too much the users <i>and</i> better because by sacrificing a bit of real estate, you show a full sheet, which better show the space feeling. Well done.

How are you migrating user data to Next? Or does it use the same underlying schema/data representations?

On a project page, the text area is like HN comments. Too wide and hard to read. Why not introduce a right-handed sidebar on the project page for just the basic navigation: Discussions, Todos, Files, Documents.

What a day. First the OS X Mountain Lion Preview and now a Basecamp Next UI Preview. Both look great!

This looks really sexy. Does this mean we can look forward to Cinco being open sourced soon too?

Will Basecamp Next use application/xhtml+xml now that it has no IE8 support?

How do you edit images to display as circles using CSS?

Nice job.

I'm disappointed.<p>The single view idea is used by many project management tools and requires a user to do the parsing. Clicks are still required to gain access to the project meat. This means quite a bit of both scrolling and clicking.<p>The design itself doesn't lend itself well to either behavior. Menus don't scroll with you, click targets look to be fairly small.<p>I'll reserve judgement until I try it myself, and 37signals need simply release this and it will be accepted with acclaim, but I'm not seeing what benefits these changes bring. That said, it is crazy fast for an early build!