Looking back on it… Reading this may have been a really relevant cornerstone of what later came to be Jumpchart.

Here’s an example: If a wireframe document is destined to stop and never directly become the actual design, don’t bother doing it. If the wireframe starts as a wireframe and then morphs into the actual design, go for it.

Documents that live separately from your application are worthless. They don’t get you anywhere. Everything you do should evolve into the real thing. If a document stops before it turns real, it’s dead.

It’s a quote from 37 Signals Getting Real book. If you haven’t read it yet, -drop whatever you’re doing…

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”:http://jumpchart.com. 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.

We’re starting to leak out a few beta invites here and there… If you haven’t signed up yet, get on the list now! We’re going to be moving pretty slow with the invitations for a while. It’s tough and sweet to finally open the gates. We don’t quite feel ready yet, -but then again we probably never will. August 1 seems like as good of date as any, -after all it’s just a beta…

Footnote. Somehow the idea of beta gives permission to the obsessives to draw a line in the sand, knowing they can draw a new one tomorrow.

On a recent post/podcast at Boagworld Marcus Lillington did a nice piece on his process for planning the architecture of a site. We thought we might make some comments about how we think Jumpchart could fit in the process.

“Map out the existing site
The first thing I do is map out the existing site’s IA…”

We’ve done our fair share of this same thing in our tests. We find that Jumpchart helps us map out the site quicker than any other method we’ve tried. Copying and pasting between browser tabs can yield amazingly quick results. Looking at the hierarchical navigation is like looking at an outline.

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.