Highlights

• A cross between Facebook and Craigslist.
• Full Social Networking features
• Profile pages
• Ability to friend other users
• Private message other users
• Integration with Google Maps and Ferret search engine to provide location based search (find all friends within 15 miles)

Divvy

Divvy is a start up where the initial idea was to allow people to share and contract physical goods such as cars, bicycles, or lawn mowers from one another using a format more like Facebook and less like Craigslist. The idea was to establish a trust through personal relationships captured through friending other users. A system was designed so that a user could create a profile and then upload images and descriptions of items they might be interested in exchanging. Like most startups the initial idea wasn't very definitive and a lot of the development was built out in an exploratory manner, this is a situation where RubyonRails is a well-suited framework. As time went on, the product has launched and morphed into a different idea, most startups do this.

Works

• City Winery
• Gist
• Divvy
• Ringjacker
• USA Wireless
• Collectview

37Signal's Getting Real

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While working on Divvy the designer in charge decided he wanted to use a thickbox (also known as a lightbox) with a form embedded inside of it. This was a huge headache because a form submitted from a thickbox happens in a different context than the page the thickbox was launched from. My gut instinct was that this was a bad idea and a waste of time on eye candy that didn't help the user experience. After trying to dissuade the designer from the poor choice I went ahead and begrudgingly built it. I don't think the end results justified the effort, we were better served making other parts of the app work better in terms of usability. I think the 37Signals approach to UI is the best I've seen so far, although it's popular and been described in detail, I've never met a designer yet that uses their approach.

1. Decide on a mantra for the App. Basecamp is about communication.
2. Think about how new functionality will contribute towards the mantra.
3. Ruthlessly cut out features if they don't pull their weight.
4. Sketch ideas for a form on paper, use the ease of erasing to try many ideas.
5. Code the ideas straight to html, skip the photoshop comps.
6. Each page should be coded with 3 states: blank state, normal state, error state.