slate blog

Editor’s Note: It turns out this is kind of a dupe of an earlier post by Chris. Hopefully it’s still interesting.

I don’t know how many people noticed a certain similarity between Basecamp and the new look of slate (see this example) but, to be honest, it’s there. To quote the architect of the new look:

I wanted the interface to feel like “Basecamp for content”. My end goal was not to copy what they’d done simply because it was cool or something, but rather that I had a need for a two-column design. – from ryan’s blog

That being said I do feel that, for the most part, the new design is a close relative of what we’ve had in the past. For example, we’ve always had tabs so don’t go thinking, “Oohh, Basecamp has tabs they must have copied that…” Not so.

So lets get to it to show you how we were inspired. I’m going to highlight five usability changes. Overall though it’s pretty obvious how we’ve utilized the Basecamp two-column design. Again just for the record, we already had tabs :p

Theirs:

Ours:

1. Site Title: One of our bigger changes was the dropping of the bar that showed the sites a user was associated with. So far people have been associated with either a whole lot of sites or only one site. So the bar took up quite a bit of space. Now this wasn’t necessarily inspired by Basecamp but it’s interesting to contrast the order we’ve chosen with that of Basecamp. Considering I think of “slate” before I think of sites it makes perfect sense to me. I’d be curious to know if other people would prefer the opposite not that it’s going to change.
2. Choose a site: To replace the site bar we’ve gone with the AJAX driven drop down showing the sites folks are associated with. We’ve placed this with the ‘My account’ and ‘Logout’ links. To me this makes way more sense then the cramped top-left of Basecamp. That said, I’d be curious to know how “easy” it is to see in the top right. Luckily most people are only associated with one site so it’s not a huge deal.
3. Users vs. People: This one I think we flipped back and forth on for a little bit. In the end we chose to go with users as I think most people who are relating to a computer program relate more easily to “users” as opposed to “people.” People just comes across as being too cute to me.
4. Right-justify little used options: We tried to clean up the component bar a little bit by pushing the more little used options like ‘users’ and ‘settings’ (was ‘properties’ pre-v0.4.0) away from the everyday options people would be using.
5. Component options: Not great a name for it… So in pre-v0.4.0 we had a bar right underneath the component bar holding the options available for that component. In this version we’ve added them to the “window” itself that holds the content being edited. In retrospect I think this is a really good solution though at the beginning I was a little more then skeptical. Did this come from Basecamp? I don’t think so… just wanted to round out the changes :)

So now you have a better idea about why we’ve made some of the changes in the latest design. Also you have a little better idea of the inspiration for those changes.