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