We can’t go too long with Jumpchart before somebody thinks of a different way to use it. Some hidden benefits have emerged as we have had time to digest our own creation.

• Like anything online, Jumpchart is always accessible. You never know when a consultation will turn into a pre-project planning session. You’re always ready where you have an internet connection.
• Paper is still useful… Although we have plans for better print styles, the paper versions of Jumpcharts are really useful.
• You don’t always want to collaborate with people. Have a public preview, or the ability to stick a Jumpchart on your own server is really useful.
• Clients can use Jumpchart to plan their own projects to more effectively communicate with their development applicants.

Using a product you have conceived of and designed can be a cathartic process for a company. It can be tough to draw the line between where you are stroking your own ego, and where the system is actually working. Over time, the difference is clear.

The short answer is that Jumpchart has totally changed the entire way we do business. W’re more precise about our ideas, quicker through the idea generation and build phase, and generally sleep better at night. Clients react to it as if there were no alternative. They take it for granted that this is how easy web design ought to be, -never knowing all of the lost time and effort they are saving.

We’ve noticed several things about our own process by using Jumpchart. Previously we had:

• Forced our clients to take a lot on faith.
• Allowed ourselves to become confused late in the build phase about what it actually was we were specifically building.
• Not understood the confusion our clients had about what they were purchasing
• Spent too much time on organizational tasks

After trying Jumpchart for a while, we noticed our efficiency, and joy growing proportionally. By having a simple agreeable format that people could rally around, we had solved many of the problems that made our jobs unpleasant. We spent more time doing the things we loved… designing and building websites.

We had happier, less apprehensive clients. We had more efficient, and happy employees. We could barely remember what it was like to do it the old way…

We come from a paper prototype background. It’s a great way to plan, show ideas, and quickly change your mind. Many times we’ve all been around a conference table with sharpies, and a stack of copy paper. It feels terribly liberating to be that careless with your ideas.

Of course eventually the ideas are all hatched, the people are all happy, and you have a stack of nonsense. So often we would get back to our desks after a great client meeting with a giant stack of pages that are all-but approved for building, -not understanding half of what was scribbled. It often went like this:

• We had just been forced, at some effort, to get everyone around one table at the same time.
• Had a whirlwind feel-good session that left everyone thinking more was figured out than actually was.
• If some sort of a summarization process wasn’t started soon, valuable information was lost as our memories receded. (Never have one of these meetings on a Friday)
• Nearly always we had to go back to the client with a different summarized format in some sort of alternate document format. All too often, this was more of an invitation to make more changes than a sense of finality.
• Once a summarized document was actually completed, we had nothing but a bunch of stale documents to again re-summarize into some format where they were useful to the actual building process.

None of these documents had momentum into the build phase. We needed something different. When we came up with the idea of Jumpchart, it was an attempt to solve several problems:

• Make collaborating remotely easy.
• Empower people to change their mind.
• Have a format that represented a more specific sense of approval
• Make entering the build phase easy

As the idea evolved, we added a few things here or there, but despite some feature creep, Jumpchart is still rather precisely targeted towards these goals.

Some examples of feature creep we’re not ashamed of:

• An expanded version of Textile that allows quick form mockups, and easy greeking
• Managing deliverables, and files on a per page basis
• Exporting valid css/xhtml that can be worked with easily and quickly
• A grey-box wireframe version of the site that is easily shareable without the need for collaboration

Jumpchart is primarily about information architecture. Call it a site map. Call it a wireframe, it’s about organization. Planning a large website requires several things:

• Collaboration
• The freedom to change
• Ability to brainstorm
• A sense that the process has momentum towards a goal

There are an amazing amount of resources that go into a typical website. From text, to images, to pdf’s, they all have to eventually find a home within an architecture. There is a science, and a method to it all. From this chaos comes order…

Jumpchart helps us get away from emails, faxes, discs, phone-calls, and the like. In its’ simplest form, Jumpchart tries to get us all on the same page… Or better yet: the same pages.