Image courtesy of Basecamp’s video tour

Do you find yourself keeping track of your projects using a mishmash of endless email threads, saved IM conversations, phonecalls, meetings, sticky notes, post-its, and scribblings on napkins and used envelopes? Struggling to recall time spent on a project after it’s done? Experiencing miscommunication with a client based on clashing expectations or surprises as to what work the client’s request actually entailed? These are just some of the obstacles that come up in the pursuit of an organized and smooth freelance ride.

Enter Basecamp, a web-based project-management application built by web design firm 37signals in response to the frustration of trying to keep everyone in the loop when working collaboratively.

Big software companies have contributed collaboration tools that tend to be quite costly, and are either too large in scale with features that many designers don’t need, or else incredibly specialized and not flexible or adaptable enough. 37signals plays the “small and cool” angle with a visually elegant and transparent tool created by designers for designers’ needs, offering a range of features scaled across different price points. While it certainly facilitates project management for collaborative efforts on a larger scale, many freelancers have found it indispensable for keeping track of their work, even on solo projects.

One aspect users have described as a “godsend” is the ability to merge time-tracking with project deliverables, allowing you to set up milestones and to-do lists for a project and time-track as you check tasks off your list.

As a freelancer, keeping accurate track of your time and work is crucial to a well-run and lucrative business. If you’ve ever tried to estimate after the fact how long different phases of project took you, chances are you short-changed yourself, sometimes by quite a bit. Setting deliverables to a project is another best-practice that designers rely on to make sure they treat the client, and themselves, fairly. A client may come to you asking you to design, say, his corporate identity, but it’s up to you to break that down into the tasks you will actually do and the pieces you will deliver to the client, from the submission of research and concept boards, to the carrying through of the final selected idea across various media.

Basecamp’s ability to track and share progress against deliverables with a client cuts a ton of excess communication out of the process, while keeping the client on track as to the materials, information and feedback he needs to provide you with to get your work done. Accurate timekeeping also provides informed time estimates on future projects where you may be working to a fixed fee at the outset.

There are still some facets of Basecamp’s time-tracking feature with room for development. For one thing, you can track overall time for an item in your to-do list, but you can’t itemize the time spent on different aspects of a certain task. Another issue is that time-tracking is currently only available the more full-featured, higher-priced versions of Basecamp—not the “Basic” level, which is otherwise all that’s needed for a lot of freelance designers. The “Basic” level, without timetracking, runs for $24.00 a month, but the price doubles when you move up to the “Plus” level to get the time-tracking feature (plus a lot more storage, which, for a small freelance practice, may prove unnecessary). It might be nice if they offered timetracking in their basic level for only a small bump in price; it’s crucial for any size business with any number of projects on deck.

Fortunately, 37signals has shown itself to be responsive to its passionate and articulate client base, which is making its needs heard on these issues. Teamwork between a receptive innovator and a smart, vocal user community has given birth to some of the best products out there, and Basecamp is definitely one to watch.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Design Careers, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.