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

Mashable

“The design behind Jumpchart is to make it easier for graphic designers, web publishers and developers to create sitemaps for themselves and clients. Some of its features include the ability to add pages, sub-pages, and content. Move entire sections of a webpage around, and interlink different pages to offer a better mockup that leaves little to the imagination.”

Web Worker Daily

“A huge part of building or improving any web site comes in the site mapping stage. I’m always amazed at the varying kinds of tools that web workers use to do site design, and I even know one top designer who does all his prototyping in Excel—because he likes it. I have a new favorite tool for site mapping, and it’s Jumpchart.”

Solution Watch

“Diagrams play a very important role in planning and communicating a site’s architecture. They help you visualize a project before developing and piecing things together, leading to smarter design decisions. Unfortunately, for a client, Information Architecture and diagrams can be very intimidating, not to mention appear impractical. Because of this, many web teams end up leaving a client out of the whole process and resort to other means of learning what they want on their website. The end result? A mess of emails, Word documents, links to websites, and so on. Jumpchart, currently in private beta, hopes to put an end to all of this.”

Webware

“Then there’s Jumpchart, which makes it very easy to prototype the navigation and basic elements of a site, and to collect feedback from other people working on the design project.”

Rev2.org

“Jumpchart is an interactive collaborative wireframe service from Paste Interactive designed to help web developers and content creators working together building the architecture of a website. The problem with the traditional website organization process, as described by the developers of Jumpchart, is that they are not interactive, and don’t carry momentum into the build phase. Jumpchart replaces the typical paper flowcharts, sitemaps, and wireframes website builders are accustomed to using.”

Jumpchart Launches!
We’re pleased as punch to announce that Jumpchart is out of beta, and fully public. Thanks to everyone for bearing with us during the development bugs. Just a reminder, all of you that signed up before today will have an extended 3 free months to continue using Jumpchart for free.

Revised pricing
We got a lot of feedback on the pricing… Most of it positive luckily. Many of the emails revolved around the page limit on the Super account, and the file size on the Simple. In an effort to suck up to all of our new users, -we’re bumping the Super account max pages from 50, to 100, and increasing the file size from 25Mb to 50 Mb on the Simple.

Blog posts = free month
Quite a few of you have taken us up on our request for blog posts, and publicity for Jumpchart. A few really well written articles have especially been making us blush. To all of you who wrote to us announcing what you did to promote Jumpchart, -we’ve got an additional free month for you. To anyone wishing to help promote the launch of Jumpchart, -you can get a free month as well… Just do something special to get the word out, and shoot us an email to let us know. We’ll continue to accept throughout the month of October.

• Thanks to one of our users, Dana, we have added a photo placeholder to the Textile markup. Just like [lipsum] works for text, [photo] works for images… Give it a shot.

• Some of our IE6 users have been complaining about hard to read fonts. We’ve replaced the font for IE6 users with Verdana, which renders much more reliably. Since we all work on Macs, we sometimes forget how un-smooth fonts render on Windows.

• When mocking up forms, [file] is now a valid Textile option for creating file input fields.

Airbag has a nice post on the misconceptions people have about website organization. We recommend reading it yourself, but the post basically talks about a client referring to sections of websites as “buckets.” Greg doesn’t make a specific judgment that “buckets” are bad terminology for sections, only that it’s probably representative of an underlying misunderstanding.

“From what I can tell this has happened as the result of more and more clients taking on the role of information architect. In the last two years almost half of our clients have come to us finished site map in hand and eager to drop the B-bomb. I don’t believe that’s the result of failure on the part of web designers and developers but the client believing that they know what works for them. A few months ago we pushed back on sitemap generated by a client. Before coming to us they formed an ad hoc group and met for six weeks to re-categorize their existing site into a new, mythical world of Bucketopia.”

This passage is what really caught our attention. It reminds us of our previous post about collaboration. It’s a strange world these days. People have access to information, and tools that only experts could use 10 years ago. Heck, 2 years ago… What this is leading to is not the mythical world of Bucketopia that Greg refers to, but rather a severely itchy case of expert-itis. Now it seems that anyone with a few dollars to buy Photoshop LE is a designer, and anyone with Office is a copy writer. People think because they have the tools they can do the work.

For those of you with beta access, we would really appreciate some feedback as we ramp up for a launch. (still some loose ends, but we’re getting closer all the time)