No shortage of other options for wireframing on Boxes and Arrows today.

PDF Prototypes: Mistakenly Disregarded and Underutilized
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/pdf-prototypes
by Kyle Pero Soucy

Creating a clickable PDF to prototype a new design is not a new concept, but it is a valuable tool that is often overlooked and underutilized. While working over the years with other designers, information architects and usability professionals, I’ve noticed that many of my colleagues believe the same fallacies about the limitations of PDFs. Contrary to popular belief, you can do more than just create links and interactive forms with PDFs; you can also add dynamic elements such as rollovers and drop-down menus, embed audio and video files, validate form data, perform calculations and respond to user actions.

Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/interactive
by Maureen Kelly

Have you ever wished your early design mockups could come to life, so you could try out the navigation, test an interaction, or see if a button label just feels right when you click on it?

Sure, you could invest in a dedicated prototyping tool, but you can create surprisingly quick and effective prototypes with a software program that’s probably sitting on your hard drive right now. It’s PowerPoint—and no, I am not kidding.

It would have been nice to know about these options a couple years ago. Today, we can’t help but think Jumpchart solves these problems in a more functional way. The more abstracted an idea is, the less useful it becomes. There is simply no way to turn these dead mockups into a website… Once they’re approved, they’re trash.

Also, Jumpchart brings something else to the table… -Your clients. Giving clients the ability to directly contribute to the evolution of content is a powerful thing. It commits them to the process, and saves you work.

No matter how you work, -even if you start out in Powerpoint or Acrobat, Jumpchart can have a place in your workflow. At some point, all of your content has to be translated into a format a developer can use. No matter how much fiddling you choose to do beforehand.

Jeff Gothelf Throws out this snippet in his article on boxes and arrows

Proponents of HTML wireframes believe that, if developed according to company standards, the HTML can be reused to build the actual site. This would require the IA to have expert coding skills that take advantage of the latest developments and trends in coding such as XML, XHTML, and CSS. However, by building a high-fidelity prototype that is meant to be the codebase for the actual application, the IA has less room to experiment with various architectures and ideas as changes could alter code marked for reuse. Again, the “screen notes” section could not be implemented as it would not be part of the final application. This would relegate any supporting documentation to an external document which would then need to be compared with the prototype.

It’s a great testament to providing a way for IA’s to do what they do best, but not leave their work as an artifact. Pre-project work should turn into the project at some point.

Despite what you might think, a beta really is a learning process. For us, it hasn’t been about running around stomping out bugs so much as it’s been about learning about how users use our app. We have had one recurring issue with the edit button…

It seems that some of our tweaks we made to help IE be as responsive as we would like caused problems on some browsers, -Opera especially.

This weekend, we pushed out a new version of the edit button that we hope will be much more universal. If you have a beta account, -give it a shot, and tell us what you think. If you don’t have a beta account yet, -sign up for our beta newsletter. We’ve been handing out invites at a quicker pace lately.

The beta is going smoothly. No server hiccups to speak of yet. We’ve uncovered some real compatibility issues with the Opera browser, but other than that, it’s been smooth sailing. We’re opening the floodgates a little wider, to see what happens. If you’re interested in participating, but haven’t signed up yet, -head over to Jumpchart.com.

One of our favorite things about Jumpchart is it’s focus on content. It forces you (or gently encourages) you to plan the navigation, and the content organization at the same time. We’ve seen some backwards processes in the past…

• A project starts with a flowchart. As copywriters and content creators fill in the skeleton of the site, they’re obligated to write pages that didn’t need to exist. They wrote to the frame, instead of writing the story.

We’re very close to launching the beta of Jumpchart. We’ve put up a newsletter signup/ beta invite request at the official URL: http://jumpchart.com

A few things we’ve been working on.

• The beta invitation process
• Sample Jumpcharts to help people get acquainted.
• Tightening the screws on cosmetics
• Making a dev server so we don’t have to experiment with changes on the live beta server
• Working on better video tours. Right now they’re lacking audio since nobody at Paste sounds like James Earl Jones.

What content rises to the top of a website? Certain things are decided by clients, others by process… Some things just come from the gut. Some of you out there might do extensive focus groups, card-sorts, and user testing to determine architecture. -That’s just never been our way.

Call it a symptom of budget, call it callous disregard for trusted methods. It is what it is. We just tend to think that people will follow the paths that are laid for them if the paths are intelligently lain. Trying to determine site navigation by gauging a consensus is like trying to decide where to install a gutter by watching the Weather Channel…

On picking paths
When you’re trying to determine navigation for a site, pick a person to be sympathetic to. Imagine a member of your target audience, and try to get to know them. Get inside their head. Come up with the five questions that they would have that might cause them to arrive at your home page. If you keep the user’s goals in mind, you can’t go wrong with navigation.

Here is a list of Wireframe attributes as defined by the information architect Dan Brown, who has worked on sites for US Airways, Fannie Mae, First USA, British Telecom, Special Olympics, AOL, and the World Bank

Milissa Tarquini has written a great article on Boxes and Arrows about The Above-the-Fold Myth.

She’s right… People do know how to scroll…

There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

We’ve been working on providing user feedback the last few weeks. It’s important to take a step back at some point, and analyze what’s obvious, and what’s… not. It can be tough to look at something you’ve created with fresh eyes. But it’s imperative to try and look at your application from the perspective of a new user.

We’ve been repeatedly signing ourselves up for new accounts, inviting ourselves, and imagining use case scenarios.

It’s such a competitive landscape these days, -there are thousands of websites vying for peoples’ attention. It’s important that your application makes an effort not to lose people at the outset.