We have a big problem: getting overwhelmed by the number of projects we have -- which was the main reason we switched to Basecamp in the first place. We're a small company with just a handful of people, but we have a number of internal projects and a number of client projects going on at the same time. 

The current Home dashboard offers not a lot in regards to organising this. I can sort by cards or list, and can pin, but that's it. This means that all of our different projects are lumped together, making it hard to navigate. If only there was a way to group projects together so they would be visually separated. 

On the Basecamp home screen where it shows all projects, is there a way to separate them into subfolders? For example…I want a project list for Proposal, Under Contract, Active, Closed.

It would be great to be able to sort projects into folders (i.e. by client, etc). We have a lot of internal and external projects and it would be good to subdivide them to make them more manageable (esp for me as manager, because I have access to them all!) 

Is it possible to categorize projects? I use BC to manage a real estate company, with each project bieng a customer file/home/land etc. 3 or 4 categories of projects would be super helpful. I now try to group them with a big capital letter at the beginning of the description in order to know what type they are. But this is not a clean way to see my projects.

Appetite

Solution

We're adding the ability to create stacks of projects on the home screen. They're for organizing projects for yourself, not across the company.

Could they be folders? Sure! But we'll start with the idea of little piles of project cards.

iOS provides prior art for this. The phone's home screen looks and works great filled with icons, but if you want to keep more apps within reach, drag one icon on top of another and create a folder. It's a way to add dimension without a lot of complication. Then, give that folder a name. Drag an icon out of the folder to remove it.
 
We'll do something similar. Drag a project on top of another project and you'll get feedback that dropping it there will create a stack.

Once a stack is created, you give it a name. The stack should look like a stack, similar to the Set Aside pile in HEY. A stack takes up the same amount of space as a project card.

The top of the stack is a card with the name of the stack and the number of projects. We can try other ideas. Maybe one of the projects is shown and the stack's name appears beneath the card.

When you click a stack, it opens on top of the home screen and you can see all of the project cards it contains. Click one to go to the project or close the overlay.

Stacks are for pinned projects. The most common case is dragging a pinned project on top of another. You can't create a stack of recent projects that lives in the recent projects section as that section is dynamic.

You should be able to drag a recent project on to a stack, though. Say you've created a stack of client projects and notice one in recent that's not included. You can drag that onto the stack to add it (and technically, pin it.)

What about the high percentage of people who have never pinned a project? We can let you drag a recent project on top of another to create a stack, it just means that stack will be created in the pinned section. Making that transition smooth and not too surprising could be tricky. We should try to support it, but I don't think it's essential. If you've never pinned anything, recent projects is likely showing you all of your projects all of the time. If you haven't had the need to pin something, you likely don't have the pain point stacks solves.

Other details

• Dorin explored the idea of creating additional sections on the home screen instead. Ultimately, it felt like that would make what's already a long, full page even longer. When you want more organization, you have a lot of projects. Stacks let you consolidate things and bring order to what can feel like an packed wall of project cards.
• HEY's Set Aside screen shows you that you can drag to create groups. We can experiment with making it more obvious that you can create stacks if it doesn't get in the way of the more common case of someone having a handful of projects. 
• We'll need a way to remove a project from a stack, which may need to be in the UI in addition to letting you drag it out of the stack.
• It could get tricky, but ideally you can organize the projects within a stack, too. You can't create a stack inside a stack, though 🚫.
• I don't think we have to bring stacks to the list of pinned projects in All Projects. In my mind, the view serves a different purpose and can remain a simple list of pinned projects. For instance, that list is in alphabetical order rather than the order the projects are on the home screen, and that hasn't caused any friction. 

The mobile apps have completely native Home screens and making the drag-and-drop experience really good would require a lot of work — probably an entire 5-6 weeks. Given the priorities for the Calendar app this year, we may need to consider a read-only view of the folders to start. That's not ideal, but we don't support drag-to-reorder pinned projects either at the moment. Maybe there's a UI that we could come up with that would cut down the scope of the work.

Organization is a personal thing. Look at anyone's desk, or computer, or home screen — people have all sorts of ways to make sense of what they have in front of them. Having someone else organize your stuff is quite frustrating. 

In-project is different because everyone sees the same thing. But at the home screen level, where different people have different access to different things, it feels personal. You may want to organize by cycle. You may want to organize by product. You may want to organize by status... So many ways. Folders are personal.