It happens a lot during app development… disagreement over some feature. One person thinks it ought to be “on” by default, the other “off.” Things have to feel right from the start. It’s worth sweating, and it’s worth fighting over(not physically). When an impasse occurs people tend to reach for the old stand-by: The Preference Setting.

Preferences are a really important part of application design. They let people customize the way they use an app. They let people feel ownership of their environment. It sounds like a great idea; Whenever you’re not sure, just give someone a preference to choose for themselves. -It’s the cheap way out, and it’s usually a bad idea.

There are lots of legitimate reasons to put preference toggles into your application. Not being able to decide on a feature, or not wanting to hurt coworkers feelings shouldn’t be one of them… Preference settings should be the last resort.

If fights break out in your group over small things, or if feelings get hurt over details, your group dynamic is busted. Your dynamic is equally busted if people don’t speak up enough to say what they think. Next time you get to a sticking place on a feature for your app, do yourself a favor. Don’t just put yet another pref. in, talk it out until a decision is made.

One of the first times it occurred to us to build this new app is when we were discussing the types of information people swap in groups. It might seem strange, but there are actually very few types. Because of this, project management apps on the market today differ more in how they look than how they work.

All of the PM apps try to give some context to bits of information that somehow relate to some relevant category, -usually a project. In most cases, each bit of information is categorized, and located with bits of information similar to it. Like a to-do on a page with a bunch of other to-do’s. But what is a to-do?

That’s maybe the question that started us on the line of thinking we’re currently chasing after. Every bit of information that other PM apps make you hop from page to page to see are identical, except the context.

• A to-do is a bit of text with a toggle for completeness.
• A time entry is a bit of text with a quantity associated.
• A message is just a bit of text.
• A file is a bit of text with a file associated.

The rest is just context, or meta information. We realize that small discovery isn’t really rocket science, but it led us down an interesting path. What if we make the bit of text the focus, and the rest secondary.

While other apps force you to keep switching context by moving from page to page, our app pretty much disposes of context in a physical page concept… In fact, our new app pretty much does away with multiple pages all-together. Chronology is the context, and the rest is just meta info that describes a bit of text and it’s relation to workflow as a whole.

It sounds weird maybe at first. Things that are new always sound a bit weird at first. Despite it sounding weird, we think you’ll get it when you see it. So far, we’ve found that:

• We’re more in touch
• We use less email
• We enter our time more diligently
• We’re not missing waiting on new pages to reload in our old PM app.

We’re really excited to show you all the hard work we’ve been doing. We think you will like it.

The fact is that we’re all potential victims of a bigger fish. We knew it when we built our app. We’re a couple thousand lines of code away from extinction. Bill Gates said he worried most about 2 kids in a garage. These days most of us are the proverbial kids in the garage, -and we should be scared of the Microsoft’s of the world. Those companies who are big enough and rich enough to give away for free the thing we’re eeking out a living selling.

The internet has been falling all over itself trying to figure out where to stand on the 37 Signals:Campfire / Google:Huddlechat issue. It’s a great discussion, and it’s about time we had it. It surfaces a lot of issues. (more…)

We’ve been having some server issues today. Sorry for the inconvenience. We have a planned move to more stable hosting in the next few days. We’ve actually been working on it for about a month now, but it seems like it just can’t get here soon enough. Sorry again.

Tantek Çelik one of the developers of Technorati wrote a nice post about the waning usefulness of email. Here are a few highlights.

“Point to point communications do not scale.
All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of “To” in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit.”

He goes on to talk about 1-to-many communications, and their importance. 1-to-1 still has importance, but the more transparent you can make your communication, the better…

“Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.
Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than IM (as compared to the time spent on writing the content itself), thus people naturally put much more into an email (perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that interface tax overhead across more content).”

Limits are good. Give people a giant canvas, and they will surely fill it up.

It’s true. email is a broken tool for group communication. And if you’re not working out ways to communicate with groups of individuals in singular ways, your message is not being received and multiplied the way it ought to be.

Read the full article

It’s impossible to talk about the PM space without discussing Basecamp. We’ve spent the most time with it of any web apps, and it’s the main cause of us building our new app. Basecamp just doesn’t fit the way we work anymore… We find ourselves running duplicative systems via email, ical etc. We made a real effort to adapt, but after 3 years, we use less of Basecamp’s features than ever.

Basecamp does a brilliant job of making things simple. In fact, if it weren’t for apps like Basecamp, projects like our new app might never have happened. Still, Basecamp is a bit old, and it’s improvements over the years have been evolutionary. For us, -we think it made the move from old grey Microsoft apps to younger smarter web based apps possible. But would Basecamp be the same if it had been conceived of today? Now that the barrier is down? Now that Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, and countless others have shown the world new ways to communicate and collaborate?

A few places we think Basecamp misses the mark.

• Everything is broken down into small categories of information. You spend more time refreshing to new pages than digesting their contents. Information density per page is ridiculously low.
• Pages all look the same. For people who live on the web, the navigation is pretty simple. For other people, they feel like they’re trapped in an old Nintendo game where every room in the cave looks identical to the last. Landmarks are rare, and the hierarchy is too subtle.
• The home screen (dashboard) is a great idea, but showing the 5 most recent things on the 5 most recently active projects gives a false sense of chronology.
• Nobody thinks crossing out completed todo’s, and hiding finished lists makes any sort of sense.
• There is a strong dependence on email throughout. If people were able to live in the software the way they ought to, email notifications wouldn’t be as necessary.
• With the mix of “Writeboards”, “messages,” and “chat” communication is spread all over the place. Without self imposed rules, communication turns to a mess.
• Permissions are not transparent. It can be confusing knowing who is able to see what, especially when clients are involved.

Basecamp is a loved, and famous product. We don’t want a turf war, -but it’s not perfect. We think after all these years there is room for innovation in the PM space again. Like Basecamp, our app won’t please everyone, but we think it will strike a pretty strong chord with people who work like we do.

We announced a while back that we were beginning work on a new kind of project management/group communication app. We’d like to share some of the conclusions we’ve reached about current PM apps over the last several months.

All PM apps seem to suffer from the same recurring problem. They’re designed to manage projects, not people.

With current PM apps

• email is imposed as a communication tool. While aggregating useful emails in the app is nice, not using email at all is better. email sucks for group communication.
• People have low awareness of what work is going on around them. top-down management is on the way out, and new apps need to reflect that transparency.
• Long winded descriptions are the mainstay. People need to be empowered, and encouraged to be concise.
• Chronology is hidden. “Who’s doing what right now” is the question most PM’s constantly are asking themselves.
• Progress is charted along corridors with little awareness what’s going on outside. If you’re like us, many projects, and many tasks happen during a day. The group works together on many projects collaboratively, not separately on their own.
• There are hundreds of screens to wade through. Apps should not spread useful information so thinly.
• Human nature is ignored. Instead of embracing the way people naturally do things, the way is enforced…

We’ve launched a new feature in Jumpchart today. There are now several handy keyboard shortcuts accessible. We’re hoping never leaving the keyboard to add pages, and edit text will really speed up your workflow. Here’s a list of what’s new: (more…)

It’s been a little more than a month since we launched our first product, Jumpchart. Along with catching our breath and working on improvements for Jumpchart, we’ve also been daydreaming our next product. Since things are in a lot of flux right now, we can’t say too much.

What we can say is that, like Jumpchart, it’s a tool for people like us to do our jobs better. Also like Jumpchart, this new program is a tool that combines several things that are very instinctive and simple, -in a brand new way.

We’re attacking this question of “How do I communicate about, and keep track of my progress at work?”

It’s a question many people have answered before in myriad fascinating ways. We think we might have our own interesting answer…

Account upgrades

In our ongoing attempt to make sure we’re providing the best value we can, we’ve upgraded our Simple and Super accounts to 100Mb and 1000Mb respectively. This change is effective immediately.

New auto-login invitations

The most asked for feature in Jumpchart has been a simpler invitation system. We’ve listened, -and as of today we’re announcing a brand new invitation process. From now on, when you invite someone to participate in a Jumpchart, they’ll receive an auto-login link. By simply clicking the link, they will automatically create their account, and simultaneously login to start collaborating.

This change also effects our current users. Since the email becomes the primary account differentiator, -you’ll need to start logging in using your email address rather than your username.

Global RSS feeds

We’ve added a global RSS feed so you can keep track of all your project changes through one convenient feed. It’s available through your project home page.

Clickable breadcrumbs

Small change, – but now the breadcrumbs at the top of the Jumpchart editing area are clickable so you can hop up levels more easily.

We installed the updates early this morning, and everything seems to be humming along nicely.

Thanks for your support, and we hope you like the new login system. Please send comments and questions to support@jumpchart.com