Among developers, 37signals has achieved a cult following for giving us web applications like Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire, and the Ruby on Rails platform. But the real secret of their success is as old fashioned as your great grandfather’s Victrola. It’s customer service.

We opened a HighRise account to manage our A List Apart author contacts and then didn’t use the account for whatever reason.

This morning I cancelled my account with two clicks of a button.

The messaging clearly explained that canceling the account would mean losing the contacts, and provided an opportunity to rethink the decision.

When I chose to go ahead with the cancellation, it happened instantly, and I was taken to this page, which reassured me that the account was closed and that I would stop receiving product-related emails. Smart. I was instantly satisfied and had no more questions. How often does that happen when closing, say, a phone or cable or internet account?

The page also offered me the opportunity to try another 37signals product or to provide customer feedback in a survey. If I had quit using the product because of dissatisfaction with it, I would have been able to use the survey to tell 37signals everything I disliked about my experience. If I liked the product but found it wasn’t right for me for whatever reason, I could tell them that (which could help them focus on their core audience’s needs).

All smart, businesslike, and yet inoffensive and un-pushy.

37signals not only constantly fine-tunes their products, they also think about the customer experience even when the customer is leaving.

I find that instructive, educational, and inspiring.

Disclaimer: Jason Fried is my friend, and I do business with 37signals through The Deck advertising network, so I’m not impartial. Just impressed.

Filed under: 37signals, Advocacy, business

If you enjoy A List Apart and zeldman.com, please doff your chapeau in the direction of our sponsor, the 37signals Job Board.

Everyone knows 37signals, inventors of Ruby on Rails and creators of Basecamp, Highrise, and other great productivity apps. We studied the leading web design and development job boards before signing on with theirs. Each job board we looked at had something great going for it.

We chose 37signals’s board because it appeals to the hybrid designer/ developer who cares as much about great user experience as clean code—the kind of web professional who believes great content and great design are inseparable. This new kind of designer, forged in the fires of the web, reads ALA and this site, and the 37signals Job Board is where you are most likely to find him or her when you need to hire skilled professionals with vision.

Income from the board helps defray the cost of producing our sites and paying our staff. But more importantly, running it alongside our articles provides a service to our readers, whether they seek a job or a great employee.

Filed under: 37signals, Advertising, Coudal Partners, Deck, the, industry, jobs, work

Friedrolling: vt. Gratuitously posting Basecamp referral links disguised as tweets or blog posts.

“Man, damn the internets! That’s the third time today I’ve been Friedrolled when I thought I was clicking on porn!

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, referral

Filed under: 37signals, Blogs and Blogging, tweets

The Seed Conference, held in Crown Hall (the “Cathedral of Modernism” designed by Mies van der Rohe) is a one-day event about design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration. Learn about taking control of your own work by seeking out methods to inspire new thinking and adopt unconventional ideas about collaboration and business.

Speakers include Jason Fried, Jim Coudal, Carlos Segura, Jake Nickell and and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Edward Lifson, and Gary Vaynerchuk. An open panel will follow the presentations and the day will conclude with a reception on the lawn of Crown Hall, featuring wines selected by Mr. Vaynerchuk. Registration is $499/person; attendance is limited to 270; seats are going fast (with nearly 50% sold out in the first week).

Tags: seed, seedconference, design, conferences, segura-inc, carlossegura, 37signals, coudal, threadless, vaynerchuk, edwardlifson

Filed under: 37signals, Community, Design, Ideas, events

Great jobs for designers currently available on the 37signals Job Board include:

• Happy Cog is looking for a Creative Director in Philadelphia, PA.
• Apple is looking for a Senior Web Development Engineer in Vancouver, BC.
• Cook Medical is looking for a Flash Designer/Developer in Bloomington, IN.
• Woot is looking for a Web Designer in St. Louis, MO.
• Flickr is looking for a Senior User Experience Designer in San Francisco, CA.
• Newgrounds.com is looking for a Web Development Guru in Philadelphia, PA.
• Amazon is looking for a Customer Experience Designer in Seattle, WA.
• NextScreen is looking for a Web Developer in Austin, TX.
• Confidential is looking for an Associate Creative Director in Hollywood, CA.
• SEOmoz, Inc. is looking for a Lead Web/Interface Designer in Seattle, WA.
• Billups Design is looking for a Front-End Web Developer in Chicago, IL.

Tags: design, webdesign, jobs, happycog, apple, 37signals, flickr, hiring

Filed under: 37signals, Design, Happy Cog™, work

We’re as pleased as pale punch to welcome web designer, CSS whiz, microformats monger, icon designer, outstanding public speaker, and best-selling CSS-design-book author Dan Cederholm and his freshly redesigned SimpleBits site to The Deck, our advertising network targeting web, design and creative professionals.

Dan is a friend and creative hero of mine (and of yours, too, I bet), and it is a thrill to be able to drop a few pennies in his cup.

The premier advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals, The Deck serves up millions of page views each month and is uniquely configured to connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience.

Tags: simplebits, dancederholm, advertising, webadvertising, deck, thedeck

Filed under: 37signals, A List Apart, Happy Cog™

Tired of fighting for smarter design, usability, and web standards? Take your talents where they can do the most good. A List Apart and zeldman.com are proud members of the 37signals Job Board. Recent job postings include:

• Happy Cog Philadelphia is looking for a Front End Developer in Philadelphia, PA.
• The Sherwin-Williams Company is looking for a Web Developer in Cleveland, OH.
• Vimeo is looking for a PHP/MYSQL Developer in NY.
• Homes.com is looking for a Web Designer in Tallahassee, FL.
• Ham in the Fridge is looking for a Senior Designer in Minneapolis, MN.
• National Council State Boards of Nursing is looking for a Webmaster / Designer in Chicago, IL.
• Vulcan, Inc. is looking for a Sr. Quality Engineer in Seattle, WA.
• Singapore Telecommunications Limited is looking for a Usability Engineer in Singapore.
• Crate and Barrel is looking for a Internet Project Manager in Northbrook, IL.
• JibJab Media is looking for an HTML Engineer in Venice, CA.
• Smack, Inc is looking for an AJAX minded, front-end developer in Toronto, Ontario.
• TIBCO Software is looking for a AJAX Web Development Engineer in Palo Alto, CA.
• Environmental Working Group is looking for an Applications Programmer in Washington, DC.
• Design Kitchen is looking for an Interactive Strategist in Chicago, IL.

Find your next job or find your next team member on the 37signals Job Board.

Filed under: 37signals, Design, industry

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The path the plane took

Interactive graphic shows path taken by single-engine plane registered to New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle that crashed into a residential high-rise on East 72nd Street, yesterday, killing Lidle and his flight instructor. It’s amazing how disasters lend themselves to the creation of cool infographics.

Subtraction + Zeldman

Khoi Vinh (AIGA/New York board of directors, design director for nytimes.com) should interview himself, but instead he interviews me on the cusp of my AIGA New York talk next week. As previewed in the interview, my talk will focus on how to build relationships that let you sell clients good work.

Web 2.0 Validator

Hilarious. (The score for 37signals.com is 7 out of 52.)

Meyerweb: W3C Change

The third (and most radical) of Eric Meyer’s proposals to save the W3C from irrelevance: “Transform the W3C from a member-funded organization to a financially independent entity.”

Fireside Chat

Cederholm, Sims, Santa Maria, and Storey tell 37signals what they think of the state of web design. (Things I did not know before: no boxes, grids, or columns were used in web design until web standards came along to ruin everything.)

Daring Fireball: Qualcomm ends Eudora development

I’ll stop using Eudora when they pry it from my cold, dead, one-button-mouse-clutching fingers. Oops, maybe sooner than that.

UsedWigs Radio Podcast 18

He could have been a radio star: Greg Hoy of Happy Cog Philadelphia is interviewed.

0sil8

Jason Kottke’s first website. Take that, Ze Frank!

Class Critique

Jason Santa Maria takes it on the chin.

Tags: design, AIGA, webstandards, happycog, jasons

Filed under: 37signals, Design, Standards, Zeldman, industry, war, peace, and justice

Some people who read zeldman.com have positions to fill. Others are looking for work. The ones with positions to fill are looking for clued-in designers and developers; they can’t find enough of them. The ones looking for work have had their fill of ordinary jobs; they seek greater challenges, and they have the chops to succeed. So I’ve added the 37signals Job Board to this site’s sidebar.

There were job boards before 37signals had one, and new job boards have popped up since. But of all the job boards old and new, 37signals’s seems to me to do the best, uh, job of connecting smart people with good positions. Recent job board postings include:

• Fandango seeks a Database Engineer in Los Angeles.
• CNET is looking for a Software Engineer in Bridgewater, NJ.
• United Nations University Media Studio is looking for a Web Application Developer in Tokyo, Japan.
• Sapient is looking for a Senior Site Developer in NYC.
• Periscope is looking for an Interactive Flash Developer in Minneapolis, MN.
• The Indianapolis Star is looking for a Development Manager in Indianapolis, IN.
• Million Dollar Homepage is looking for a Senior Web Developer in London.
• KickApps is looking for a Web Designer in NYC.
• Burton Snowboards needs a Web Designer in Burlington, VT.
• Soccer.com seeks a Usability Designer in Hillsborough, NC.

The Job Board is linked on pages at Signal vs. Noise, A List Apart, and zeldman.com that generate millions of page views a month. It’s the best place to find or post a web tech or design job.

Tags: webdesign, webdevelopment, jobs, 37signals

Filed under: 37signals, Design, development, industry

I have always wanted A List Apart to connect web designers with web design jobs and never gotten around to making it happen. Now, thanks to 37signals, it’s on.

Starting today, the sidebar of A List Apart displays one random job from the 37signals Job Board — a new job on every page. It’s a great match for ALA readers seeking work and web-smart businesses with jobs to offer.

Companies including The New York Times, CNET, Facebook, Adobe, and American Express already use the Job Board to find today’s brightest web minds. Now they will find more of them. The best designers, developers, and information architects in the world read A List Apart, to the tune of 14 million page views a month.

14 million a month! I don’t know of another web publication that reaches so many clued-in professionals. ALA readers are uniquely concerned with accessibility, web standards, and crafting exceptional user experience through deeply considered design, writing, and structure.

Over the years, ALA readers have written to tell us that they owed their careers to skills our magazine helped them hone, and concepts our magazine laid before them. Adding the 37signals Job Board to our sidebar is a logical next step.

I am delighted to think that one day soon, we’ll get email from readers who found great jobs through A List Apart. And I’m even more thrilled to think about all those web standards fans taking their accessibility concerns and user experience chops to great companies like Crate and Barrel, TBWA, and American Express.

Today, the 37signals Job Board comes to A List Apart. Tomorrow, standardistas go to work at leading companies. The revolution will be salaried.

Filed under: 37signals, A List Apart, Accessibility, Design, Standards, development, industry, work

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