Jumpchart Interactive Collaborative Wireframing

Jumpchart is an online interactive wireframe tool for clients and developers/designers to collaborate with. I’ve always found functional wireframes and “live” information architecture to be preferable — websites don’t exist on paper. Most clients I’ve worked with have difficulty understanding the interplay of a site until they’re clicking around page to page in a browser. This web app solves that, and seems to give the client/contractor relationship a sense of real collaboration that could help gets things done more quickly.

For my money, Jumpchart’s best feature (other than online collaboration) is that after client and designer finalize the sitemap, it spits out valid CSS and XHTML to build your site design over. In case you didn’t catch that, that means for a large percentage of simple projects, you might not have to hire a developer/programmer. If a designer has a decent sense of information architecture knowledge, a client and designer could build a site together rather quickly (and most likely at a lower cost.)

Then again, some folks don’t want anyone (or anything) coding their CSS/XHTML. For everyone else, there’s Jumpchart.