Basecamp, a project management tool, has been around for a little over two years now; however, it seems like it recently received a spike in popularity (at least that’s my view, considering two different projects I’m working on joined up in the same week). It sounds like its the new gold standard in project management tools; but despite all the buzz, I haven’t been too impressed.

One of the big selling points for Basecamp is the fact that you can manage multiple projects at once. In my work at LotterShelly, I got the fun task of setting this up (since they have multiple projects going on at once). How long do you think it should take to create 20 different projects (not writing anything about them, just adding a project to the group of projects). 5 minutes? Maybe 10? It took me 30 minutes, and I was actually trying to do the task quickly.

Currently adding a project is a 5-step process that takes place over 4 screens. The path of my mouse looks something like this…

1. Click “Manage Projects.”
2. Click “Add New Project.”
3. Type the name of the project.
4. Click “Submit.” (It’s below the fold, represented by the dotted line.)
5. Click “Dashboard” to get back to the main page.

37signals, the company that made Basecamp, followed Nielsen’s Heuristics closely… especially Consistency & Standards. Each of the four screens in the process looks exactly the same, making it very tough to tell which direction my mouse had to travel on a particular screen. I felt pretty stupid getting lost so frequently in a simple task, and suddenly this simple task was taking a lot of time.

Adding insult to my new carpal tunnel injury, it appears that Basecamp only lists the first 30 or so characters of each project. The trouble - we listed our projects as “Client - Project”, so any 30-character-long clients with multiple projects that all looked like “Client - … ” in the Project List. Tough to tell those apart, yeah? So… I got to edit them all. Again. Repeat the process listed above. Another 30 minutes down the drain.

Here’s how Mac handles this same problem with its User Management bit in System Preferences:

It seems like this would be the ideal way to manage numerous similar elements… but I’m not the one making these decisions. Oh well.