This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

love it

Just so you know, your use of Google Maps screenshots without attribution on the customer page is a copyright violation. http://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines.html

Nice work! Reminds me of the 37signals.com from 2006. http://bit.ly/bXjKDs. I love the minimalism. I felt like your previous design tried too hard.

Looks great!

I’m a fan of it. The lack of real navigation is slightly bizarre, not quite as concise in that regard. I do like that the company and product blogs have real links now instead of contextual links further down the page.

Nice job!

Great job. Love the clarity of message, the minimalist design, and the choice of Adobe Minion for the font throughout.

Beautiful!

Great job with the new design. It feels much more like 37signals now. The serif fonts make it less businessy and more legible than the old site.

Looks pretty good – but it does kind of remind of those single page, SEO optimized affiliate websites where everything is centered :S.

I like all your designs but I never copied one :)

Like the new product header. Clear and clean. But the footer (More about 37signals) is like a reversed christmas tree, or ice cream. Makes the bottom of your page look less solid to me.

@ceejayoz – so is your use of snooki. But whatever.

I love the redesign! As always, great work from the 37signals crew.

Hey there,

I’m running FF 3 .6.10 on Windows Vista. When the new page renders, I’m seeing a 1 second flash of the entire un-styled DOM before the CSS is applied.

It’s not happening on IE, but it’s consistently happening on FF when I hit refresh.

Looks great. There seems to be a style loading glitch on Firefox on OSX – I see a non-styled page for a split second on each load.

Gorgeous work. I love the flow from top to bottom of the page.

Very nice work guys – I love the minimalism (as many others point out). It’s simple and easy to understand and gets right to the point. It directs the user to where you want them to go – so usability wise – GREAT JOB !

awesome…jealous

Love the redesign. Quick question: Why are you still using Flash video on your http://37signals.com/speaks page? That struck me as odd for such a progressive web-focused company. Any reason?

Love the simplicity of the redesign. Looks great – love the “footer” with the large to small links.

Would love to know the man hours behind this rebuild. Something that we can use as a whitepaper/case study to our own clients that are looking to hit a simplistic design – that do not understand the actual labor behind it.

Many of us face “Ya, Ya I just want simple” and with everything accounted for, it ends up more expensive than everything but the kitchen sink.

Great new design. I love everything about it.

I liked the old footer more, but I think that’s just more of a personal preference. I don’t think it would have worked with this new design.

Very nice work.

Jason and team,

Good Job. But the homepage is suffering from, “infinite scroll.” Which I think is bad UX. Again, these are my opinions and I am just trying to give honest feedback.

Also, Where is the career page and other notables? One thing I do really like and could relate to is the timeline—very nice!

Cheers, Taylor Barr

The design looks great, but I am seeing that firefox bug where there is a flicker of unstyled text on the page while the font is being loaded. See Paul Irish’s post for what I’m talking about: http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout

The new design is really nice, your attention to concise information shows.

The only issue I have is your claim “we haven’t raised prices in years”. In my opinion when you removed the $12/mo plan back in March you effectively raised the price for small shops who don’t need 15 projects at once.

37s makes great products and I pay the extra $12/mo, but I feel like the cost (for me at least) was raised.

This will probably be covered in your posts about the copy, but I was curious about the sentences under the red text for each product.

In the previous design, there was some inconsistency in the descriptions (Highrise was two sentences, Campfire didn’t start with a verb). On first glance, the sentences in the redesign diverge further. Basecamp cites the number of users versus differentiating the product. Campfire, while dropped to one sentence, uses the phrase “your business”, which seems a little awkward given that all the products are for “your business”. Why not for “remote teams” as in the previous design?

Very interested in how you chose the specific copy for each product.

Awesome work on the overall redesign!

Great work! I also love the new minimalist approach. More like it was before the last redesign. I always found the previous version had some noise and that the important message was diluted. Now the message is bold and clear.

I very much like that the single phrase “A better way to work with the people you work with every day.” is the main focus as you enter. It is more descriptive than simply “A better way to work”. We understand right away we are talking about collaborative tools.

I hope the conversion rate will increase. Please let us know as a redesign is good as long it drives more sales, not more traffic.

A single note maybe: I found out as I visited the new homepage (before you announced it, then not knowing what each product icons/buttons were hiding), that I scrolled down to see what else was on the page before hovering on the 4 product buttons. The top phrase was partially hidden, so I had to scroll back up. I wonder if when a user is hovering his mouse, should the page scrolls back up (slowly) making sure the phrase is in the focus.

It’s good, but did you have to use ‘soup to nuts’? That idiom is beyond cliche’ now, and not in a good way.

I like it apart from a couple of issues.

The main heading “A better way to work with the people you work with every day” feels a bit clumsy to me compared to the old “A Better Way to Work”.

What about the people I only work with occasionally, have 37signals got anything to offer me then? That’s a question I might ask if I were unfamiliar with your products. Did you consider “A better way to work with people” as an alternative?

Secondly, when you hover over the application icons, the main heading dynamically changes, thus drawing your eye to it. Which is fine apart from the application name in the heading looking like a hyperlink when it isn’t. I bet if you did heatmap testing you’d get a fair few people trying to click the application name in that heading.

P.S. One minor copywriting quibble: it’s GitHub not Github.

A better way to work with the people who you work with everyday

(note: sorry for the above comment: google chrome cut off the comment)...

Like the new design. Clean and simple.

One thought: I think the opening sentence a better way to work with the people you work with everyday is rather awkward.

The meter of the sentence is thrown off midway – have you tried saying it out loud much?

I would adjust either for meter/musicality:

A better way to work with the people that you work with everyday

or

“A better way to work with the people who you work with everyday”

that way the hard ‘work with’ consonants fall on the same beat from sentence half to sentence half.

Maybe that’s picky—but I always read taglines out loud and if I can’t beat a drum to it, it doesn’t pass.

Safari on iPad crashed every time i opened the page. Looks good from the screenshots.

Love it. I like that individuals are listed on the customer wall rather than organizations, since that’s how Basecamp, etc. often get used in practice: the official structure doesn’t make a decision (or it just passively approves a small recurring expense), folks actually doing the work do. Some other commenters’ copywriting nitpicks seem accurate, but not a big deal for me. It has personality, gets across what’s good about the products, and quickly funnels people to signup.

very much back to the roots.

I really like the trust mark icon “trusted by millions of people – in over 30 countries” – I’m glad the intense focus on social proof didn’t get compromised int he new visual design.

Love the inverted pyramid in the footer!

Like John and Tony, I also feel the main headline is clumsy.

Otherwise, it looks entirely copiable … I mean, inspirational! ;o)

@ceejayoz, you would be right… except there is attribution. Derp!

Great. Simple, to the point. Million times better than the previous version.

It’s nice and clean.

But in a lot of windows size, they are no way to know than we can scroll (except the browser scroll bar).

Very nice. I know how hard it is and the discipline it takes to design something that’s largely text-based, so kudos.

One thought, though: I feel like the page isn’t grounded without some form of header, even if it’s a simple horizontal rule with no background color. Did you guys have discussions over that? I get the feeling as though I’m not quite scrolled up to the top or something (I know you could argue that the 3 links, right-justified are the “header”, but I don’t think that’s quite enough). I’d also probably move the logo in the heading, and start the page with the opening “A better way…” text. My 2 cents.

I’m curious to see if you will improve or worsen your click-throughs on the products. And you may not even be paying attention to that, but it’d be interesting. Aesthetically, I like the newer version a lot more, but it does hide more info underneath of a hover, so I’m wondering if that will toy with click-throughs. Of course, it’s hard to tell why people click things (info-driven or visually-driven).

Also, I noticed that you did indeed think of the iPad “lack of hover” issue, which is a nice touch.

Lastly, I’m glad you changed the “soup to nuts” section to have icon-based links for the core products, instead of the original text-based links. It didn’t feel right mixing your core 4 products in with the freebies.

Overall great redesign. I love the addition of the 8 point-of-view statements. Very well done. The clarity alone is inspiring.

Like John Topley, I also found myself tripping on, “A better way to work with the people you work with every day,” and thought a more fluid phrase might be, “A better way to work with the people you work with.” (Even that still feels a little clumsy…) Maybe, “A better way for people to work.” Bah…

Talk about functional (and great looking) design. Nicely done guys!

Regarding the product section: are you not concerned about the lack of hover-functionality on touch devices?

A better way to work with people. That should be the header IMHO

The new site still crashes safari on iPad every time.

The fonts look like sh*t when viewing in Chrome on Windows.

I would flip your H1 and H2 around… the H2 is more compelling and clear to me.

Lance

agree with joe on the font thing (large fonts)

it looks great! The only thing I didn’t like is the skinny red arrows .. makes it look unfinished.

LOVE IT !!!

Am I the only person who thinks 37signals designs have become WORSE over time

One more thing… I find it so strange to hear that your goal is to redesign the home page a couple times a year. That goes against much of the conventional thinking about Web site design (right or wrong).

What are you actually solving for? (surely it can’t be just that you want to ‘keep things fresh’) Do you take that same design approach with your applications? (doesn’t look like it—I use a couple of ‘em)

And are you testing the impact of your new design on your desired outcomes?

Please share more about your thought process around optimizing home pages… we’d love to hear it.

Lance

(I think I don’t like the newer 37signals designs because they no longer use a strong grid-based layout)

Is there any significance to the order in which the four product icons appear?

Seems like you just launched the last site. Is there any reason you fell out of love so quickly?

@nathan

“Yes”, I’m the only person or “yes”, you agree – the designs from 37signals gets worse.

It’s much easier to read if you do CTRL – twice, to reduce the zoom 2x

Makes the headlines much more scannable. At such a huge font size, it’s very difficult to read

@dude 04 Oct 10

http://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/26373700765

It’s there now. :-)

Looks good. Definitely less wordy than the previous iteration. Those that don’t like the length of the page (requiring lots of scrolling), I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

Refreshing the design of a site at least every 18 months is always recommended for my clients. It does seem like the previous design was relatively new, but who cares?

The purpose of this site (in my opinion) is to drive traffic to their paying products. If people are still interested, the lower parts of the page are more for support and background info.

There’s a bug in chrome (windows) where leftovers of the original “title” remain in the background when you hover one of the links

screeny:

http://i55.tinypic.com/zwezwl.png

I’m getting horizontal scrollbars in my 1024×768 browser

Crashing for me in iPad also.

I like the new home page as well and agree that it’s an upgrade from the previous iteration.

My only request is that you specify an explicit background color and text color as the default. I purposely set these to be weird colors in my browser so I can tell who has and hasn’t bothered setting them. If you want to ensure that your site looks as intended for everyone, that’s a quick way to do it.

Love the site. Just curious to know what you did with your media section from the old site. Was the section not valuable?

Gooood work guys.

About the “switching out” of the main copy. It looks to me there is some sort of overlay going on here, i.e. hovering over the products overlays the main headline with product-specific copy.

The only thing is that part of the main headline is still visible in Camino (i.e. the overlay is too small), which looks kind of ugly.

Levi Smith’s linkie is brokie itworthnoting.com should be itsworthnoting.com (i think). I randomly decided to click his.

+1 John Topley

“A better way to work with people” is simpler and cleaner.

100% iPad crash here too.

This might help: the iPad crash always occurs just after rendering the 4 product boxes and bottom left red arrow. The rest of the page is still empty, count to 3 and BANG Safari closes.

iPad crashing is probably caused by custom font usage. If you re-open the page again in Safari it might work (it will crash randomly though).

Back to the basics again. Was suprised when you went to the previous design.

Really like the design. Going back to your roots is good. I’ll have to test ipad for a crash…stay tuned on that. The main thing with a homepage is what is your purpose and what do you want your visitors to do? This is key in any design…conversions are essential. Thanks.

Highrise remembers the important things about people you’d normally forget

Love the new homepage, just as I loved the old school ones. Why are the blogs’ designs the oldest? I’d think those—the product blog in particular—are more important product sellers, no?

Wait, “copying”? I thought it was “inspired-by”.

GREAT new design.

Nice design. One minor thing: The edges of the photos and book on the homepage appear with jaggies for me (Firefox on mac). Someone forgot the anti-alias filter?

Keep up the great work!

I’m definitely missing the sign in button from the last design … grew quite accustomed to using it every day. Otherwise it’s a really nice refresh!

Nice clean design, however the harsh contrast between the black headers and white background is not ideal practice for users who suffer from Dyslexia. Headers using #333 and a slightly off white background is much more accessible for these users.

The site looks great. Liking the clean design.

Overall, very nice. Great work.

The only thing I’m not a fan of are the red arrows and their blurriness.

Looks great. It’s visually less bold, but more pleasant to parse.

I had a feeling that, at some point, you would end up with a single-column, top-to-bottom layout that explains your company, philosophy and services in a linear narrative. It’s a very simple and effective approach that I think was perfected first by spammy SEO sites that drive people towards some type of purchase. The difference, of course, is your design sensitivity and execution.

One question about font sizes though. They are very large, which is nice for higher resolutions. Are you at all concerned that it’s too overwhelming on lower resolutions?

Much better! Really didn’t like the later designs even though I’m sure they were effective. Bit retro future like…

Developerland link relegated, sniff.

Very nice, very clean. Also, I love the 37Signals logo…just curious as to how the design came about?

Beautiful, elegant result – and a massive improvement. Well done.

Love it. You folks always inspire with your words, designs and creations. Thanks for everything you do.

Love the design. I like clear, bold headlines, use of whitespace, nice graphics and of course, the very impressive credentials. However, the things I do not like are the use of ”* * *” as separators (maybe a line would look better) and the footer (agree with Rein).

My first comment here. Am a fan of your books!

I just finished rereading Ogilvy on Advertising and the redesign reminds me of the way advertisements used to be – greater emphasis on the text and getting the message across. It may also be the use of Minion Pro.

+1 John, Tony, Alejandro, possibly others; the copy for the two headlines are imperfect. The simplification feels better (though you might prefer more words for SEO rather than for users?)

Makes me wonder, how is the new blog design coming along?

Damn, I like… both. Previous design was cool too.

The new design looks like a Geocities page from 1999.

Love the new site. There is a fine are to simplicity and you have done a brilliant job.