This situation can derail an awesome project faster than a parent chasing a two year old making a mad dash for the stairs.

When lots of people are giving their input, it’s often the case that sidebar conversations get left out of the general stream. Progress loses its groove and you’re headed straight for stalls-ville.

We know connecting all the dots can be tough. It’s one of the main reasons we built such a strong collaboration feature into Jumpchart. Here’s my favorite part, though. You can collaborate how you want to – whichever way fits your workflow best, Jumpchart accommodates. We made it easy for everyone to have a voice, or for the elected team leader to share the project with the committee and relay feedback that way. We know not everyone’s workflow is the same, which is why Jumpchart fluently adjusts to fit even the more specific situations. Here are a few we’ve run into:

Situation #1: The Committee’s in Control! 

In this unfortunate situation, you probably have lots of people actually making the decisions. They all want their voices and opinions heard. There isn’t one person “in charge” to give the final word. Well, that’s okay. Even though the approval process could get a little hairy, everyone can give their two cents on Jumpchart. If they’re all full collaborators on a project, they can comment on each page, edit the content as they wish, and work together to come to an agreement. They can even change their minds on which version of content they agree on – revert back to an older draft at any time. Email notifications can alert everyone when something’s happening, so nobody is left out.

Situation #2: The Committee’s Interested, but Not Overbearing.

Here, you have one person in charge. But as a committee usually does, they want to know everything that’s going on. The person in charge has full permissions on the Jumpchart project, but can choose to add the committee members as view-only collaborators. This way, they don’t have to bear the burden of making comments, approving design mockups or editing content; after all, they have other things to do. But they always have a bird’s eye view of how things are progressing.

Situation #3: The Committee Checks in Every Now and Then. 

When the committee must give their final approval, chances are they want to see the finished product, and maybe check progress a couple times in the interim. Without adding another login to their list, the person in charge can show the committee the public wireframe view. Whoever’s interested can browse page by page, without ever having to log in.

The committee approval process isn’t always the easiest, but if you collaborate your way, things go a lot smoother.

Just because your name tag doesn’t say “Content Strategist” on it somewhere doesn’t mean you don’t play the part as you’re building websites. That’s okay. I repeat: That’s. Okay.

We’re not content strategists, either. That’s partially why we created Jumpchart in the first place; we wanted a tool that allowed us to be better at putting the pieces in the right order. Jumpchart makes it easier to navigate the waters of site architecture and content organization. But maybe more importantly, it allows you to make edits to everything, anytime. You’ll never lose any of your work – you can always change your mind and go back to and older version of content. Pretty great, huh?

Let’s face it. On your quest to help your readers accomplish their goals in the most useful way possible, you probably won’t nail it on the first try. So take a step back, look at the bigger picture (Jumpchart has a fantastic site map view for that) and try, try again.

If you want to be one of the first to check it out, send an email to info@pasteinteractive.com.

Only catch is that you have to send us some honest feedback once you kick the tires.

This puts us in a really great place. Some of us are building the apps we know the rest of us need to do our job. Since many design studios are just like us – that means (usually) there will be demand for what we build.

We’ve been tossing around an idea for a small application here lately. We have a problem tracking purchase orders for client work. Stock photos, printing, screen printing, etc. all get purchased on behalf of our clients. It is a complete mess to try and track:

• How much the vendor quoted you
• Which vendor had the best price
• If the vendor responded
• If the vendor included tax, shipping, etc.
• How much you told the client it would cost with your markup
• How much it actually cost when the job was done

We’ve been toying with the idea of building a super simple app to help our design side manage this. We’d love your feedback on whether you think it might be useful to your studio or business too. I’ve attached some super simple wireframes below.

What do you think? Would you use it? If it was free? If it was $5?

It’s a small thing, but one of the most helpful features in the new version of Jumpchart we’re building is project icons. On your account homepage, you’ll see a grid full of projects, each with their own customizable icon. If you manage lots of projects like we do, you won’t believe how such a simple thing can improve how you use Jumpchart.

That way there was no guessing where an image or PDF went when it was time to build. Page level attachments remove all the ambiguity. There is a downside to this organization, though. How do you find one file in the middle of a hundred pages? Hopefully you’ve put the file where it makes most sense, but memory only serves us so well…

In Jumpchart 5, we’re finally solving this problem. The all new Resources section will give you an aerial view of all the files used across an entire project, including their size. It will even show you the mockups you’ve attached, along with their approval status.

We’re hoping this quick way to see all your files at once will really speed up your workflow. It should also make it much easier to see where the largest files are if you’re managing your account limits.

Here’s one last tidbit about the Resources section: We’re caching queries and using Amazon for file storage, so it’s super fast. We’re really excited to have you give it a try when we launch.

The problem is, it confused people. It made exports weirder. It was us dabbling in UI type situations when Jumpchart is supposed to be about organization, not design.

Thankfully, we’re ending all that in version 5. But for all the relief that brings, we discovered we had a new problem. How do we handle all the extra monitor space, since a column of text can only be so wide without being impossible to read?

The solution took us full circle in some ways. We brought back two columns … but they’re not indicative of layout. You always have a comfortable reading width, and we take advantage of the extra space on your monitor if you have it. It’s so cool, when we first implemented it I just sat there dragging my browser window back-and-forth like an idiot.

The trend with most tech companies is to keep everything very secret until it’s ready to launch. There are a lot of reasons why this is smart, but it’s also boring. We’ve sort of followed that trend without giving it too much thought up till the last few days. As it turns out, we think the benefits of sharing what we do and how we do it far outweigh the alternative.

So we may discuss some features that don’t make it to prime time. We might talk about how great something is, then change our minds later. But what’s wrong with giving ourselves that permission? We want to show you what we’re working on.

So without any more preamble, let’s talk about Jumpchart!

We thought it might be fun to catch you up on some of the incomplete designs that didn’t make it.

Starting Out.

This one is a direct predecessor to the thinking behind the current Jumpchart. While it is a cleaner arrangement, and it led to some ideas you’ll see in the version we’re working on, we scrapped it shortly after its creation. We really wanted to do something that felt big. And we wanted it to be responsive. We started here with a basic reorganization of the app, but ended up with a total redesign.

Baby Steps.

This one started to feel better, but the organization, and hierarchy still weren’t right…

Getting Closer!

Finally, we have this incomplete mockup; it’s the last mockup we abandoned before we started on the all new Jumpchart 5 that we’ve been working on for months now. In some ways, it’s the most direct predecessor.

Next time I write, I’ll show you a little bit of what we’ve been building!

If you have an emergency during the break, just shoot us an e-mail – we’ll do our best to get you taken care of as quickly as we can.

Happy Holidays!