Designing Brand with Reliability in Mind with Adam Stoddard, Basecamp

Episode Transcription

Adam Stoddard:

The best brand is the brand that you can reliably produce and end to achieve, a really lofty goal that you can actually reliably hit that does the work.

Christian:

This is a Better Product original series on product brand. I'm Christian.

Anna:

And I'm Anna.

Christian:

Before we jump into this episode, I want to pause and invite you to join our upcoming speaker series. It's five weeks, five speakers with countless product insights starting October 28th. You can register by going to betterproduct.community/speaker-series. So again, that is betterproduct.community/speaker-series. In case you're wondering, the dash is a hyphen, if you want to be official about it. But anyway, if that's too long of a link to remember, just go to our community site to get connected.

Anna:

Adam Stoddard, designer at Basecamp, joins us for our series on product brand. As a brand design team of one, Adam is responsible for the entire design of the Basecamp website, as well as the design of the new HEY app, an app reinventing email. One thing to keep in mind as you listen to Adam, is that he is responsible for both the design and the development for Basecamp. Now, Basecamp is a unique company with a distinct brand, but what was it that compelled Adam to join?

Adam Stoddard:

So I think the thing that resonated to me and I think it's still kind of a hallmark of how tHEY approach things is just tHEY approach everything with this kind of... It's like an essential-ism. It's like cutting through all this kind of layers of B.S. and stuff you don't need, and just kind of like cutting right to the meat of something and how that translates into products is these very clear, simple, straightforward products. It's always trying to strip back to the most essential version of something.

Christian:

As Anna shared, Adam is leading the charge with a HEY app developed by Basecamp. As a designer, what's the approach taken when developing a new product brand?

Adam Stoddard:

We tend to approach brand development, I think, from a little bit of a different perspective in that we mostly start with tone and messaging and not visuals. Also, part of that is because, formerly 37signals and now Basecamp, they have such an established brand, regardless of whatever particular look and feel might be attached to that, hat is going to come through in some way. You see that with HEY where if you look at basecamp.com and hey.com, they're aesthetically very different, but they share a lot of similar hallmarks in that they're very messaged driven, very copy driven, and also fairly pared back visually.

Christian:

When it comes to brand, I think most people think of the look or the visuals associated with it. So why did they first start with messaging and copy?

Adam Stoddard:

For us, it's a little more about carving out what makes a product different and unique and special. If we don't have anything there, the rest kind of doesn't matter. So it really was spent a lot of time focusing on really building up this story that we want people to come away with.

Christian:

Adam shares his appreciation for the essential-ism or simplicity approach to how Basecamp developed. As a solo designer, being able to leverage standards and design systems that are repeatable makes Adam's job easier, yet, listen as he shares the type of things to look for when designing with efficiency for a product in mind, efficiency that helps the product team as a whole.

Adam Stoddard:

This goes for the Basecamp brand as well, but so it's things like for making a new landing page, how easy is it going to be to create the assets that I need for this? So am I going to have to tap in a contractor to produce something? Is it something we can do in house? Then there's the whole other side of, because I'm also the developer of all these websites, so there's also, how does this translate to something that's efficient for the web? Because the websites we produce are very lean. If you put HEY through the Google Lighthouse scores, you'll see nothing but hundreds and that's that's a very intentional thing. Again, with these kind of blobby, simple primitives, those translate really well to SVGs.

So they're small, they're light. I don't have to produce five different variations at various densities and sizes. It just, again, streamlines this entire thing. I think that's one of the benefits of kind of how we approach design from this kind of holistic perspective that you can kind of lose when you have specialists in these kind of little silos where typically, a brand designer isn't necessarily going to be thinking about how something they're producing might translate to an efficient webpage further down the chain because that's so far removed from their area of expertise that it's just not even a thought.

Anna:

Are there places where you find yourself kind of struggling with web optimization or the ability to use a certain design element? How do you kind of have those conversations or have those kinds of disagreements with yourself?

Adam Stoddard:

I am a very big fan of self-imposed constraints in general, which is part of the reason why I approach web development from the way we do. That's kind of why I enjoy not just designing websites, but actually building them. My background is in more traditional graphic design, and I still enjoy that work, but it doesn't have the same satisfaction to me as doing web work because there just aren't that many constraints in print work.

You can kind of do whatever whatever you want to do, but hitting that mark of having something that's both really aesthetically pleasing and very efficient and very usable, that is ultimately very, very satisfying to me. Yeah, that does tend to mean that you're making some kind of concessions over what you might be able to do in print. But I guess I'm of the belief that the web is a fundamentally different medium than print. I don't actually think that mimicking print is the ultimate goal. Web is beautifully responsive in that it can adapt to this enormous array of devices that print just can't do so. Yeah. I find that very, very satisfying to kind of navigate that line between having something that feels really good, but also is a very good web citizen at the same time.

Christian:

You're doing both sides to develop the design and the development. It seems like you have a very good grasp on how to mAnnage that. Now, if you step out and think about that for other products, would you advocate for what you do? Meaning somebody else is starting up a product and says a product team and you're the advisor of that team, are you advising something like this, or do you think that there's just something unique about what you do and that for most people, it's better to have that? Or do you think that there are more positives to the way that you're sort of handling both sides where you think the product is better because of that?

Adam Stoddard:

I think especially for companies in their earlier stages or companies that just want to stay small, the kind of approach that we take is extremely valuable in that you can produce design faster with fewer people. Also, you end up not spinning your wheels on things that aren't making a huge difference at the end of the day. So what I'm about to say is anecdotal. This is not a hard and fast rule, but we've done plenty of A/B testing around various homepages on basecamp.com with very richly illustrated versions and that we spent weeks like, "Oh, this is the perfect illustration," and they didn't do anything, or in some cases, performed worse.

As a very early company or a very young company who really, they don't have time to spare, it's really easy to go off on these little tangents that you think might have value, but really aren't helping you in any real way. So I think the more kind of intentional and rigorous you can be in an early phase, the better off you are. Then there's also purely from a personnel standpoint. The smaller and the more nimble and the more cost efficient you can run your business in those early days, you're going to be better off. To date, Basecamp, we still don't have anything that really is middle-mAnnagement. So there's these huge efficiencies that come with working this way.

Christian:

It almost sounds like you're able to leverage the knowledge that you've gained, not just maybe some of the standards that were set with the way that you all speak as 37signals in Basecamp, but it sounds like you're almost able to leverage some of the data that you've gained from those approaches to almost shortcut the experimentation on HEY. Do you feel like that's true now, or are you also running a lot of experiments on HEY?

Adam Stoddard:

No, we actually haven't done any experimentation on HEY. One of the great things about Basecamp.com is we get a lot of traffic. So anytime we'd run an A/B test, we are always trying to measure actual conversion to paid, not just sign-ups. That's a really critical thing because on multiple tests, if we had just measured sign-ups, we would have fielded a winner that was actually not a winner at all, where we're basically just injecting a lot of noise into the funnel because we weren't properly qualifying people who were coming into that funnel. So they sign up more, but then ultimately, fewer people would end up converting to paid. To test for paid requires just a significantly higher number of people going into that A/B tests to be able to do that. So we can, with basecamp.com, we can reliably do that in a timeframe that is worth doing it in, maybe a couple of weeks. HEY, because it's a new product and we're getting good traffic, but it's not to the level that Basecamp is.

So it's just harder for us to do that. We're also, because it is new we're still dealing with the ramifications of this big influx of people, we're not at the point where we're like, "Let's squeeze every drop out of this so we can get even more people into the funnel." We will get there, but we're not trying to go warp speed at this exact moment in time. So the performance that we have now is just fine.

Christian:

Yeah. I would imagine too. It's like you're still in that like grand opening phase. You're probably getting PR, you're getting people still sharing it and you don't know. It's like you open a restaurant, you're going to get a lot of people that just want to try the new restaurant, but you don't know if they're the people you're going to be surveying long-term. So there's that influx. Seems like some of your decisions need to wait until it's gotten more regular to figure out, "Okay, who are the people that are really coming and why are they finding out about us?"

Adam Stoddard:

Absolutely. I think there's a lot of value to just letting the dust settle a little bit before we start making a lot of decisions around those kinds of things and really start trying to tinker with those dials, because right now, because things are... There's no... We haven't hit that steady state yet. So until we can get there, it's a lot harder to see what's noise and what isn't.

Christian:

Are you familiar, I don't want to make assumptions, but are you familiar with Superhuman?

Adam Stoddard:

Oh yeah, yeah. Sure.

Christian:

Okay. I would imagine it must have come up as you're discussing, but what struck me, even when learning about HEY, contrasting it with Superhuman, there's such a difference in the way... You're both trying to completely change email. Then everybody who uses, either one of them says it's life-changing, but I'm looking at Superhuman now versus HEY and it's reminding me how Superhuman is very heavily focused on you as a person and speeding through your day and efficiency. Whereas, Hey, and in the sort of letter that's on the homepage, is very much treating email with value and the focus is on email as a thing. So I I'd love to hear a little bit more, if this came up in these discussions, of how do you actually position what it is that you're doing? Because you could focus on the person, their speed, their day, making them Superhuman or focus on emails. So I'd love to just learn a little bit more about some of those discussions on how that decision got made and the position you were taking.

Adam Stoddard:

Yeah. So Superhuman was, and well, more specifically, I think Mike Isaac's article about pixel tracking in Superhuman had a direct influence on the development of HEY and specifically, the spy pixel blocker that we baked in that was kind of a direct reaction to not just Superhuman, but products like that. Email marketing software has done that for years, but there's this distinct difference between a single human looking at what you are doing with email and just you, as one of tens of thousands of people, opening a newsletter. It feels so much more invasive because it is so much more invasive. That kind of backs out to a bigger philosophy of HEY. I think it's pretty apparent on both sides too, where you can kind of see the philosophy of both products were Superhuman, and I don't know, maybe this might be a slightly on charitable interpretation, but it's more about making a faster horse.

It's not changing what email is. It's simply making the current thing faster and doing some other things for people who are more in sales position, like including read receipts and things like that. HEY comes from a completely different perspective of putting you back in control of email on multiple fronts. That was like, from the beginning, one of the central themes that most of the features were kind of developed off of. So that's manifested in with email today or pre-HEY, maybe I should say. Anyone email you, lands in your inbox and now that's a thing that you have to deal with. So we built a screener, so you can be like, "Nope, sorry," and you never hear from them again.

People can see what you do with your emails, and spy pixel blocker to address that. You're constantly getting notifications for emails, whether they're an important email or not an important email. You get a notification no matter what. HEY doesn't notify you about anything, unless it's important. So it's all these various points. It's all about giving you control again of this thing that is largely out of control and fundamentally, that's what makes the email experience just terrible because it is literally a thing you just have to deal with.

So through all of these different measures, and including the various boxes that we have where your main inbox, is really only email that you actually want to read, which is a far cry from the normal thing where it's just this laundry list of promotions and stuff. Yeah, that was a very conscious effort from a very early point in the products development. Yeah, it just informed absolutely everything. In my opinion, that's what makes for good products is having a concrete perspective that can guide where the product is going and not just an amalgamation of features. I think that's really what distinguishes mediocre and good products from great products.

Christian:

There's almost a respect for email. You see it right in the thing that you used to get emails you like and all that, but that's really comes through. In the product you're making, you're almost treating email with a respect rather than just saying, "This is just something..." There's emails you don't want, you mentioned all that, filtering those things out, but it almost seems like you're goal oriented. You're filtering out these things to help someone get to the things they care about rather than just be like, "Well, let's just get you to stop having to use email because everybody hates it and it sucks. Let's just get you out of here." You're like, "There's actually some good stuff in here we're going to help you get to that."

Adam Stoddard:

Exactly. For the past several years where you see people, kind of in mass, moving to products like Slack as a reaction to like, "Oh, email is terrible. Let's jump ship." But now, you're kind of hearing the opposite of like, "Oh God, I'm just in Slack all day long. It's just this constant noise that's coming at me." Basecamp has always been huge proponents of asynchronous communication. Email is the original asynchronous communication tool.

It's fantastic at it aside from all this other stuff because with synchronous tools, you feel this pressure to engage and respond in that moment. Whereas with asynchronous communication, you have the opportunity to kind of take a step back, formulate your thoughts, write a articulate response, and then send it when you have time. It's a completely different vehicle. That's why most of our communication, when we're pitching something, we don't have a meeting about it, we write up a long form message in Basecamp about it. So asynchronous communication is kind of fundamental to Basecamp as an organization. So yeah, to your point, yes. We think there is something in email that is absolutely worth saving.

Anna:

So you mentioned starting the HEY brand with the tone and messaging, not the visual. So talk to me a little bit about why you go about that process like that.

Adam Stoddard:

That was tough, and since I started, kind of an ongoing conversation because there hasn't been as much, historically I should say, there hasn't been as much emphasis on the visual side of branding at Basecamp. With HEY, we wanted to do something a little different. That was a great thing because I think it kind of came out in the reaction. In my experience, you kind of can tell when a brand hits in the reaction that people have and the level of enthusiasm. So there can be a good product. People are like, "Oh cool. That's a cool product. I'm going to buy it," but when the brand really resonates, you get more into that, "Shut up and take my money territory," where there just are just, "Yes, I want it now. I need it now. Give it to me."

That's what a lot of the reaction we had with HEY. I cannot point you to a metric that's related to the brand. We're way too small to spend time to quantify that in any way. But yeah, in my opinion, that is definitely something that's resonated. I think importantly within the company, we've just kind of all recognized that and was like, "Yeah we should keep doing this kind of thing."

Christian:

Yeah. It's hard to come up with super quantifiable stats, but I know from personal experience, I hear about it and the conversations going on on Twitter and then in the design sphere. There's a bunch of great products that come out all the time, but it takes one that's got a good brand that actually gets people engaged with it. So I think from that perspective, while you may not be able to measure it, the conversations happening about it are a really good indicator that there's something else aside from just the great product that's resonating.

Adam Stoddard:

Right. Exactly.

Christian:

Awesome. Thanks a lot, Adam.

Anna:

We really appreciate your time. Christian, tell me your first big takeaway.

Christian:

The first big takeaway was something we talked about towards the end, which was a kind of focus on the product itself and the respect for what it did. It's a subtle thing and really, as he was talking about his process, talking about Basecamp, and then I'm looking at the site again, I was sort of seeing it through fresh, and really just became clear to me that it's not just the authenticity that comes through. He mentioned the essential-ism sort of facet of everything. There's just such a, not just cleanliness, but a focus on what's good and rereading the kind of letter on there that talks about email. You're missing good emails. I guess I just resonated with that and you can kind of think of that and hear his interview and think about the fact that it's not all about building products to streamline and make things efficient or get rid of inconveniences. There's actually really good things that are out there. They've just gotten screwed up over time and there's ways to sort of get you back to doing those good things. I think that's what really stuck out to me.

Anna:

Yeah, really tied that, I loved his approach of the brand efficiency and how they're thinking about brand. They're a highly, highly balancing. He is a brand team of one and he is the person who has to... Now only does he have to design it, but he has to build it and create all the assets and everything. So I don't know that that's something we've ever really heard in regards to brand this idea of like, "We want to make sure the visual assets are super lean and that it's a really efficient website to load," which I don't know that a lot of brand people would talk about it like that. But I think it's just a really different perspective. It's something that I think we understand, having design backgrounds, that it takes a lot of work to make something very, very simple. It's probably more work to get that brand down to its bare essentials.

Christian:

Yeah. I think too, if you were a single designer working on something that was maybe triple the visuals that they have on HEY, you really put yourself in a position where you're either going to be working 12 hour days to keep up with that, especially if you're also coding it like he is on their landing page, but you start realizing you're setting yourself up for all that work.

So it's not just enough to say that, "Oh, just being your own designer developer will naturally do that," it's also a decision that you have to make on keeping it efficient so you can do it well. He has a very keen sense for what his capabilities are, what the maintenance is going to be around that and then how it fits with the overall company. So I think if you're listening to his podcast wondering, how do I translate that to my own product? It's not just about saying, "Oh, everybody's should go lean like like this," but it really is just having an awareness for who your company is, what your voice is and matching it through the visuals that you bring out there. I think even he said it in the beginning, the messaging and the speech that they have is really where they start. They started with that before the visual.

Anna:

I also like it's a very essential, very minimalist brand, but at the same time, it is a great brand, and that's what he said. The business ROI on a great brand is that your product is next level and people will talk about your product like it's that next level because it feels next level and it looks next level. I just love that his quote, "A brand can take a good product to shut up and take my money," which I know is not his quote, but he put he all together and tied it to brand. [crosstalk 00:23:52]

Christian:

He did. He said it on here, and he's the only person who said that on this podcast.

Anna:

That's true.

Christian:

We don't know anything outside here. All right. What one other guest does this remind you? Pop quiz.

Anna:

Oh, man. Good question. I don't know.

Christian:

I was thinking Leon. Did you do that one?

Anna:

Oh, yeah. It's his minimal approach to it, but I think if I recall, his was a scrappy leanness of just like, "We've got to get something out. We've got to get something up," but you're right. It does have a very, very similar feel.

Christian:

I suppose that there's a trend to cut to come out from this. It would be cool. It almost be nice to see some copycats just because we always joke about all the people that copy Stripe and the design rules like, "Oh..." the slanted style, but it'd be nice if people copied a brand that was messaging forward, lean that... because I think it forces you to reflect on who you really are. I think it's like anything. You wear a bunch of loud clothing, it kind of hides who you are. If you shroud yourself in these things, you don't know what's there. I think it really exposes the value and mission behind HEY the way it's done.

Anna:

I think that design, just like everything in the world, every cycle is a response to the cycle that came before it, like the free love of the seventies. Then we had the hardest capitalism of the eighties. Everything responds to the thing that came before it. I think on the branding side, I think these highly illustrated, very big visual assets, it feels like the response to that is more toward this early nineties computing minimalism. But I think on the other side that I've seen from what our team talks about, on the product design side, I think we're moving from a really minimalistic approach to a much more shadows and gradients and going a little back toward that early odds neumorphism. [crosstalk 00:25:47]

Christian:

Neumorphism.

Anna:

So I don't know. I think it's really interesting to see these design phases talk to each other and cycle so quickly every five years, but also to see brand and product design almost moving on a different spectrum from minimalism to, I don't know, maximalism, I'm not sure what the opposite of minimalism is- [crosstalk 00:26:05]

Christian:

Victorian.

Anna:

... I'm interested to see. Yeah. Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join well, the community. As always, we're curious, what does better product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.