We love Basecamp.  Just wanted to get that out of the way.  For over five years, we’ve watched Basecamp evolve from a very basic project management tool with messages, basic to-do lists and file uploads, to a wonderful collaboration system with Writeboards, comments at a to-do level, advanced notification and permission controls and more.  Our projects and clients continue to benefit from its superior features and usability.

Because we like Basecamp so much, we thought we’d point out a few features that less-expensive competitor, activeCollab offers which would make Basecamp even better.

Progress tracking and due dates for tasks
Basecamp of course has integrated milestones, however tasks can easily go unfinished and unnoticed.  Sure, to-dos can be associated with a milestone, but unless the parent milestone expires, team members may be unaware of individual task dates until it’s too late. activeCollab supports due dates for checklists and tickets and as such, alarm bells can ring if important sub tasks aren’t met.  Many companies have tried to get around this in Basecamp by creating more milestones than to-dos, however this gets unwieldy and results in a very long list of milestones that cannot be categorized or grouped the way to-dos can.  People have been pleading on Basecamp forums for to-do due dates for a long time.  Hopefully someday soon they’ll get their wish.

On top of this, activeCollab has a nice progress bar which shows the number of tasks completed out of all existing tasks and a percentage calculation.  Another good way to sound the alarm if tasks aren’t being checked off as they should be.

Starred objects
This relatively simple feature can be powerfully useful.  It gives each user the power to select, on an ongoing basis, any item(s) that they want to keep an eye on. For instance, tasks may be grouped into various lists, but on a given day say, five of them are being focused on.  Rather than breaking up carefully constructed lists, an individual user can star those items that need to be taken care of or monitored without affecting what the rest of the users see.  This puts more power in the hands of the individual to use the system as they see fit.

Updated items since last visit
Here’s another simple feature that is more powerful than it may seem at first glance.  Project managers love quick summaries of project activity since they’ve been gone.  The Basecamp Dashboard does indeed show all latest activity, but seeing what’s new since you last looked can immediately bring you back up to speed.  Did something happen related to one of your starred items?  You can quickly be aware.

Status updates
Similar to Facebook status updates or tweets, these can help teams that are under tight deadlines, but aren’t using a chat tool like Campfire to quickly see who’s working on what.  This helps a project manager know if reminders should be sent out or if a person should be interrupted.  Sometimes it takes a while to get into the “zone” and any feature that helps team members remain there is valuable. 37 Signal’s internal collaboration tool, Backpack actually has this feature so it should not be difficult for Basecamp to implement.

Pages
Another example of a feature that both activeCollab and Backpack offer is the creation of individual pages.  The ability to highlight certain information in a permanent spot that doesn’t get pushed down as more content is added (such as is the case with Messages), is of high value to a team.  A particular collection of files, a summary of key business goals, a list of URLs to competitive sites, are just some examples of content that deserves a permanent home.  Backpack’s pages are excellent in that they allow drag and drop modules of text, images, files, and to-do lists.  Even if pages for Basecamp only included text and file attachments, it would be a great start.

Calendar month-view
Sometimes viewing a calendar in month format just helps communicate the bigger picture better.  A simple addition which again, is already in Backpack.

Ability to resize Message/comment edit windows
In activeCollab you can grab the corners of a text box you’re working in and drag it to whatever height you want.  When you’re typing a message and it becomes larger than you anticipated, it’s great to have the extra breathing room.  Basecamp’s messages auto-expand only once when a certain content amount is reached, but the customizability of dragging to fit is truly a step up.

To reiterate, Basecamp is a fantastic tool, and it’s only out of love that we post these suggestions which we feel would take it to yet another level.  There are plenty of other great ideas circulating in the forums and we encourage you to add your own two cents.

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Released in October of 2008, advanced segments for Google Analytics did more to bring the free tool up to speed with established paid tools like Omniture and Web Trends than any other single previous feature.  It gives users the ability to define audience segments quickly and easily, and then apply those segments to any report in Google Analytics.   The result is vastly more actionable reports.

Now you can quickly know:

• The percentage of “branded” search engine traffic (visitors who reached your site by searching for you by name) and their specific activities
• The traffic sources that are delivering quality traffic such as those that demonstrate engagement or directly convert
• The top content viewed by members of a specific audience segment such as visitors from California or New York, new visitors or repeat visitors, paid search or organic search visitors, or those driven via a specific email blast.
• The behavior of visitors who access your site via an iPhone or other mobile device
• The most common actions taken by those who access the site directly
• The most popular products across each key audience segment mapped to traffic source or landing page

The above is just a small sample of what can be revealed.  Examples of criteria used to set up a segment might include, page title, organic keywords, paid keywords, internal search terms, network location, campaigns, entry page or exit page, product categories or even individual product purchases.

Fully utilizing advanced segments provides true context to your data so you can easily evaluate your site’s ability to communicate to and convert specific groups.  It should be among the first steps of any web analytics initiative.  Your segments should be regularly reviewed and updated to take into account new abilities to more clearly identify a segment.  However, when updating segments, be sure to keep track of when those updates took place and factor this in as data totals may shift up or down.  For instance, adding a new traffic source to a segment can markedly increase visit totals.

Start using advance segments today and watch your reports take on a whole new meaning.

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