We won’t be opening up our new app to beta testers this week. Funny, -because it’s basically ready to let people in.

We’ve been using our new app, code named Staction, internally for a while now. It’s been… weird. Staction is a collection of ideas, and some really smart ways of thinking about our daily work process. At times it’s been more of a study in psychology than in interface design. Entering the project we knew what we felt was broken with current group collaboration, and project management apps, -and we thought we knew how to fix them. Short story is that we guessed wrong on some pretty major pieces.

What do you do when you don’t like your own app?

A couple Fridays ago was about the worst day we’ve had on the project so far. It was the day we realized that some things had to change with the app before it felt natural to us. It was a realization that some challenging and tough work was going down the drain. It was a realization of lost time…

A few lessons re-learned:

• There are several levels of immediacy to group communication. Granting access to immediacy is a bad thing more often than not.

• A flexible system is an advantage to the experienced user. A novice user needs walls to be suggested. The app needs to be committal on how you should do things but be tolerant of customization.

• No matter how fast your ajax is, and how smooth your interface, -switching from mouse to keyboard too many times slows down your activity in an app. Novice users need hooks to use the mouse. The advanced user wants to stay on the keyboard as much as possible.

• Part of interface design is teaching. You have to think about how people will improve their skills within your app. It’s great if on day one your users understand your app without reading the manual. An app that you live in daily must provide a way to become faster and better within the same interface. Watch someone who is really great at Photoshop, -it’s like a different app exists within the first…

Today, with some distance and perspective, we’re more hopeful than ever about the project. We needed that first run to quantify our assumptions. We needed for it to be right. We need for it to be good. So it will be a bit longer before anyone gets to have a peek at our work. Nobody is more anxious than us to show it off.

One of the most often requested features in Jumpchart launched this afternoon. Sitemaps. It’s been a long time coming, and we’re really glad to be giving it to all of our accounts, both paid, and unpaid. We think the sitemaps will be an invaluable tool to help people understand the full scope of their site, and it’s topology. Nothing makes things clearer than a nice aerial view.

Sitemaps are available on all your existing Jumpcharts via the right hand column tools…

A few things to notice:

• The sitemap is also shareable online, just like the Jumpchart preview.
• When you share a sitemap, and provide the link to someone, they will be able to switch back and forth between sitemap, and wireframe view.
• Each branch of a sitemap can selectively be toggled open and closed.

We hope you like it as much as we do…

If you’re interested in learning more about CSS based sitemaps, check out this article:
http://wordpress.betech.virginia.edu/index.php/2007/10/03/css-sitemap/
It’s what gave us our momentum.

If you’d like to see the sitemap in action, watch this flash movie…
sitemap-tour2

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. Read More »

Yesterday afternoon we had the most downtime on Jumpchart that we’ve ever had. For several hours we were offline due to some faulty HD issues. We’re not going to name names, but suffice it to say that for quite some time we haven’t been getting the support from our host that we were hoping for. Read 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.

One of our goals when building our new group management app was to liberate people form the strict client/project/item construct. Before modern operating systems, your only hope to find your files again was to stick strictly to a folder/subfolder routine that sometimes found you nesting items dozens of levels deep. Thankfully we’ve moved on. Today we have all sorts of ways to make virtual collections of files on the fly. We have great search that lets us find things regardless of location. It’s all about sorting.

Despite being built on top of fast robust databases, web based PM apps treat information with the same old nested organization we used in the past. It just doesn’t fit how we work, and it for sure doesn’t take advantage of the technology. Read More »

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

There seems to be a real disconnect with project management tools today. They’re missing the plural… If you’re fortunate enough to have just one project to work on, or one project to manage, you are probably in love with all of the solutions in the market today. If you work on and manage many projects you probably feel a little strung out. You either have 50 RSS feeds booked, or you refresh a lot of pages in a day. You probably go to bed and convulsively twitch wondering if you should have looked at xyz project to see if anything changed or not…

If you talk to people in the project management biz, they’ll say they’re managing more projects now than ever before. At the speed of business today, it’s really critical that information is clear, succinct, and available. The worst enemies of a project manager are a neglected project, or a missed communication. One delayed email can potentially create many unproductive workers… Time and accuracy are of the essence when your work is being multiplied.

We’ve fought against this since day one. Managing silos of work has never been as important to us as managing work as a whole. Like with great art, -a painter does not start in one corner, and work in a detailed manner left to right top to bottom. He works on the whole canvas as one. It all needs done, -and he knows if he ignores any one part at the expense of the other, -the whole thing will crumble. So while he may agonize over a small part, he remains conscious of it’s relationship to the whole. Good project management follows this pattern. If you stick your head ostrich-like into one project, you’ll suffer from your lack of perspective of the whole.

While most apps tend to staple a “global view” or a “dashboard” on as an afterthought. A loose collection of reports that tell a partial story. We set out to make an app where the aerial view was the main view. An app where you spent the majority of your time surveying work as a whole rather than with your head up your own project.

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.

What’s the secret to adaption of new software? fun. It’s that simple. Make it easy, and fun to use, and people will eat it up like candy. One un-arguable thing about today’s disparate work groups is that the social aspect of the workplace is diminished. Team building is tough when thousands of miles separate your staff. Many of us turn to dedicated chat applications, or email to remedy the isolation.

In our opinion dedicated chat applications require too much commitment. We have a finite amount of concentration, and those apps are nothing but a distraction. They don’t encourage work, -because it’s impossible to do any work within them…

email is nice since you can answer it at your discretion. The problem is that email is a broken tool. It’s too easy to have too much of too many. It’s a great tool for allowing input from outside sources, but as a group communication tool it’s rubbish.

Our goal with our new app was to make communication convenient, discoverable, and on-demand. We should be able to send simple information simply. It should feel like “sending” not like “stashing.” It should embrace the 5 major types of information that groups exchange. It should empower people to communicate about projects, and life without interrupting work. It should bring groups closer together.