Preview: The all-new Home Screen

Within the next few weeks, we'll be rolling out a new Home Screen inside your Basecamp. Since it’s a material change to an important screen, we wanted to give you a preview before it goes live.

As a quick refresher, the Home Screen is the screen that lists your teams and projects, lets you create new teams and projects, etc. It’s the starting point when you log in. That’s the screen we’re talking about.

The current Home Screen in Basecamp has been around for a few years. We’ve gathered a lot of customer feedback over that time, and have had plenty of our own experiences with the screen. We set out to eliminate a number of frustrations, introduce significantly more flexibility, and make the Home Screen more about you and what you’re working on, rather than just a general list of teams and projects. We believe we’ve done that — and more.

So, let’s take a look at the new design that’s coming soon:

Alright, now that you’ve seen it, let’s talk about what’s new and improved.

Your brand and your logo is now front and center, right at top of the Home Screen. Before it was a bit obtuse.

A single button to create teams and projects shows up right below your logo or company name. When you click that you’ll be asked if you want to create a team or a project. Before we had separate buttons, and the new project button could have been pushed way down the screen if you had a lot of teams. This is significantly simpler, clearer, and more predictable.

The revamped Project Dock. At the top of the screen we have your teams and projects. You’ll see they’re mixed now — we’ve eliminated the heavy-handed structure that required you to group teams in one place and projects in another. Teams are labeled with a little TEAM flag, otherwise everything else is a project. And now, since they’re all together, you can both pin teams and projects side-by-side, and drag and drop the pinned cards in any order you’d like! Everything you need is right up front, and in the order you want it. And, if you have an account with just a few teams or projects, we dynamically size-up the cards so they take up more room and don’t feel so anemic.

The Project Dock includes up to 12 slots for the most recent teams and projects you’ve visited. This way the stuff you’re actively looking at is always front and center. Want to keep something in the top 12 no matter what? Just pin it and it’ll stay put. All the rest of your teams and projects can be accessed in a unified, A-Z list view via a single link at the bottom of the Project Dock. And BTW, if you absolutely want more than 12 teams or projects displayed as cards, you can pin more than 12. We’ll always display pinned teams or projects as cards, no matter how many you have.

And remember, Command-J / Ctrl-J lets you jump to any team or project from anywhere in Basecamp — including from the Home Screen.

Your upcoming schedule now appears below the cards. A big aim of the new Home Screen redesign was to make it more about you and stuff that’s relevant to you. By adding some events from your upcoming schedule, you’ll have a better sense of your days ahead. A link at the bottom of the section takes you to your full calendar in Basecamp.

Your to-do assignments also now show up on the Home Screen. Like your upcoming schedule, now your to-dos are front and center. Of course we can’t display all your to-dos here — for some that could be dozens or even hundreds — but we show you ones that are due soon or otherwise recently assigned. A link at the bottom of the section takes you to all your assignments.

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Overall, this redesign is a vast simplification that…

• Dynamically puts the stuff you’re working on front and center

• Makes accounts of all sizes feel at home, and keeps them manageable

• Allows you to pin (and reorder) what’s important right up top rather than down in an arbitrary section

• Collects all less-active teams and projects on a simple A-Z list

• And shows you relevant items from your calendar and your assignments

• Eliminates visual and structural clutter that kept getting in the way

We’ve been using this screen internally for a while now, and have really grown to love it. We hope you do too.

So stay tuned — we’ll announce when it’s fully live. Until then, keep an eye out — it’s right around the corner.

Lots more great stuff on the way too.

Thanks again for using Basecamp.