If you use comments on Jumpcharts, -you probably receive a lot of emails. Up till now, the default behavior has been to email everyone involved when a new comment is posted.

Today we launched an account wide shut-off for email notifications. Visit the “settings” tab to disable it.

We had a bit of a hiccup in the Jumpchart server this morning for a few minutes. Hopefully it didn’t cause any problems for you all. Everything is back up and running perfectly…

Looking back on it… Reading this may have been a really relevant cornerstone of what later came to be Jumpchart.

Here’s an example: If a wireframe document is destined to stop and never directly become the actual design, don’t bother doing it. If the wireframe starts as a wireframe and then morphs into the actual design, go for it.

Documents that live separately from your application are worthless. They don’t get you anywhere. Everything you do should evolve into the real thing. If a document stops before it turns real, it’s dead.

It’s a quote from 37 Signals Getting Real book. If you haven’t read it yet, -drop whatever you’re doing…

We’re starting to leak out a few beta invites here and there… If you haven’t signed up yet, get on the list now! We’re going to be moving pretty slow with the invitations for a while. It’s tough and sweet to finally open the gates. We don’t quite feel ready yet, -but then again we probably never will. August 1 seems like as good of date as any, -after all it’s just a beta…

Footnote. Somehow the idea of beta gives permission to the obsessives to draw a line in the sand, knowing they can draw a new one tomorrow.

On a recent post/podcast at Boagworld Marcus Lillington did a nice piece on his process for planning the architecture of a site. We thought we might make some comments about how we think Jumpchart could fit in the process.

“Map out the existing site
The first thing I do is map out the existing site’s IA…”

We’ve done our fair share of this same thing in our tests. We find that Jumpchart helps us map out the site quicker than any other method we’ve tried. Copying and pasting between browser tabs can yield amazingly quick results. Looking at the hierarchical navigation is like looking at an outline.

We have been using the he** out of Jumpchart for client projects. It’s been amazing looking back on past practices vs. how we do things now.

This week we had two ecommerce projects land in our lap. Both of them had unique peculiarities that were specific to an industry, and of course both of them were under-funded. In short, we had to get creative, and precise about deliverables, or we had to turn them down.

Luckily Jumpchart is mature enough to use in client work. We were able to use the quick “lorem ipsum” shortcuts to mock in content. We used the shorthand form elements to show off the way we expected the checkout system to work. We allowed ourselves to redefine the project by dragging and dropping pages between sections…

While talking on the phone, one of our potential clients changed the way the application needed to behave. It wasn’t time to panic, -Jumpchart assigned no penalty for making changes. We were able to quickly reflect the changes that needed to take place without slowing our creativity.

We’ll admit, -old habits die hard. We started the process on paper. In this case, however, the paper brain-storming didn’t last past one page. It was simply quicker to get a functional clickable prototype than it was to waste time with non-interactive paper mockups.

Better yet, the first round draft was directly presentable, and understandable by the client…

37 Signals talks extensively about the Cost of change. One of the goals of Jumpchart was to not impede change. Several things happen during a normal web development process.

• Content needs to be found or created, and tagged to appropriate pages in a site
• Sections need to have names
• Sub-sections need to be added to contain additional info

Inevitably:

• Content is found or created late in the process
• Content needs to be moved, or deleted
• Top-level nav needs changed, added to, or deleted
• Sections become sub-sections, and vice-versa

In all cases Jumpchart forces no penalty for the inevitable revisions. Moving, reorganizing, and changing content is a quick-click process.

What is Jumpchart?
Jumpchart is an online tool that helps you to collaboratively organize the content that goes into a website. You and your collaborators can easily add pages, sub-pages, and attach files and images as you go. Jumpchart empowers you to change your mind about where content ought to exist in a hierarchical structure.

The best thing about Jumpchart is that it has momentum into the build phase of web development. If you believe in standards based web design, and are a css devotee, you’ll never enjoy building websites more than when they pop out of Jumpchart. An exported Jumpchart is valid CSS, and XHTML that is ready to be customized, and turned into any site you can imagine.

Why do I need it?

Other tools are useful. We love Omni Graffle, and paper mocks. We really love HTML mocks. Nothing is as easy, as scalable as a Jumpchart though. A Jumpchart allows collaboration anywhere anytime. Instead of being transcribed, or reformatted, a Jumpchart is the beginnings of your website.

You may have tried any number of solutions to your IA planning and organization before. Nothing will empower you to collaborate, change your mind, and get started building like a Jumpchart will.

No more:

• Digging through email to find attachments, snippets of text, or changes
• Having clients who don’t understand your mockups
• Being unsure what you’re going to build as a project matures
• Transcribing, or reformatting text from other formats to make them useable

Like an old fashioned card sort choosing what is important should be a matter of dragging and dropping. We built Jumpchart with the idea that we should be able to prioritize, and communicate prioritization easily.

In fact, changing categories to sub-categories is as easy as a click and a drag. Changing a headline to a bullet-point, or an h2 to an h3 is a few quick edits away.

In a perfect world, changing course would be penalty free. Everyone loves to change their mind. As we learn, as we grow, we tend to rethink decisions from the past. We’re never more educated on how we should have started a project than when we have completed it…

We’ve tried our level-best to make editing and changing a Jumpchart penalty free…

It’s the toughest thing for web designers to do. Enforce a process on their clients. Clients tend to want to give us content in whatever format they find it in. But what if things were different? Imagine:

• Having your content tagged to its appropriate pages
• Finding relevant page level changes have taken place as the client reviewed the document
• Having a track record of changes via an RSS feed

You might say: “but my clients will never use a system like this.” That may be true of some clients, but have you asked them based on your experience? Have you told them that based on your experience, other, looser forms of organization tend to cause delayed timelines, and compounded errors? If you explain this, and they still choose antiquated methods then so be it. At least you can use Jumpchart to organize content, revise based on changes, and show mockups to clients rapidly.

The real situation is that most clients are understanding, and willing to pick up things you recommend. They feel pride in learning new technology, and saving their company money. They enjoy being part of a technical process that has a focus, and is collaborative.

Before you know it, your clients will be using Jumpchart to add files. You will receive changes that are made to the actual content instead of abstracted Word documents. You’ll get comments attached to the page they are about, instead of random emails that have inadequate context.

It will change the way you work… and your clients will appreciate you for it.