Blog :: Freedbacking

Jumping on the bandwagon here: I recently took over some of the management duties for my division. In transitioning, I decided I needed a software solution to help me get organized. I've had several good word-of-mouth reviews of Basecamp, so signed up for a free account and started using it.

This has definitely been a good idea. I'm not a very organized person. I tend to compensate for this by being smart, which of course does not always work out well. Even when I know I need to be organized, I tend to resist too much process or too much organization; I have a built in bias for lightweight, agile processes. Basecamp seems to hit the sweet spot for me: it doesn't require details and doesn't drown me in complexity (I've played with MS Project just a little and decided I have no need for Gantt charts). Praising something, however, does not freedbacking make, so here's my tiny little nit.

On the login screen for your basecamp account, there is a checkbox with a label next to it entitled "Remember me on this computer". The problem is, of course, that it isn't a label and therefore you actually have to click on the checkbox itself to activate this option. A little thing (but read this fantastic article about Fitts' Law to see it's importance) that struck me simply because basecamp seems to have had an enormous amount of effort expended making the interface very smooth and obvious. This checkbox (and every other checkbox and radio button in the interface) ought to be using a label element to make selection as easy as possible.

Posted on June 28th 2006, 04:36 PM