Great article on how collaboration can go wrong on seomoz.org. (via Airbag ) The decision making process is tough in any business. Working in a bubble is rarely a good idea, but involving the wrong people to a degree greater than they deserve is a recipe for failure. The real secret to success is involving people at the proper levels, -so they feel they can contribute, -but only on areas they can make relevant contributions to.

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We’ve been continuing our busy little process to ramp up for a launch. We’re nailing bugs as fast as we can… Most of them are the kind of thing that only occurs in strange circumstance and are pretty inconsequential in the big scheme. We tackled one yesterday though, that we’re pretty proud of.

If you’ve worked with client content a lot, -you know that clients for some reason LOVE Microsoft Word. Despite all the arguments against it, they send content in a seemingly never-ending series of Word docs. Word has a couple of really irritating features for web designers you’re probably familiar with.

We’re talking about special characters, and the strange little easter egg hunt we as web developers end up doing to find them all. They’re typographically correct, -but maddening. The smart quotes, the ellipsis, the emdash. They all turn into jibber-jabber when pasted into a browser.

Yesterday we supplemented our Textile replacement to fix these common headaches. It’s a small thing, but it will hopefully make all of your lives better if even just a tiny bit. Paste away… Jumpchart will take care of the rest.

If you use comments on Jumpcharts, -you probably receive a lot of emails. Up till now, the default behavior has been to email everyone involved when a new comment is posted.

Today we launched an account wide shut-off for email notifications. Visit the “settings” tab to disable it.

We had a bit of a hiccup in the Jumpchart server this morning for a few minutes. Hopefully it didn’t cause any problems for you all. Everything is back up and running perfectly…

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)

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When we were laying out the mockups for Jumpchart, we went through 24 separate drafts. Each one borrowed from the last, but they were to a large degree 24 totally different designs. The biggest leap we made midway through was the edition of the persistent edit button.

We were having a recurring issue with where to place the main edit button. Wherever we put it, it would be inaccessible in certain scenarios. Of course it was just a scroll away, -but it felt inconvenient.

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Yesterday we launched the new feature we’ve been working on. It’s a small thing, but we expect it to make a big impact on the way people use Jumpchart. It’s called snippets, and it helps you to never have to do things twice.

We know how clients work… -they change their mind often. Give yourself a way to make quick sitewide changes by creating a snippet. Snippets are great for repeated chunks of text, and small bits of functionality that need repeated throughout the site

See it in action here

An article on Zeldman made us think about Jumpchart in a new way today.

For about a year now we’ve been designing on spec. Jumpchart is the spec work, and you’re the client. We took a giant blind guess that you might use it. It’s tough to work for free. Never knowing if your client will actually ever like, -or pay for your service. What keeps you going is your own drive for completion, and the hope that you just might be right.

In the design business spec work is the devil. We would never even consider it. But it’s exactly what we’ve been doing for almost a year now.

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.