Many factors play a part in the success or failure of digital systems. Design is certainly one of the most important ones, and it is by no means simple.

Effective communication is one of the greatest challenges of humanity. But as the director of product design at Geeks, I am interested in the part that is relevant to designing a great digital product or system, selfishly!

Whether you are communicating your idea with your team or you want to communicate to other departments about how they might be impacted, if you are reporting to your board to get a budget to sign off, or if you are looking for an investor to fund the project ... you need to make sure everyone is on the same page and clear about the digital product/system you are "talking" about. I have written another insight about this here

Not too long ago, system specifications were communicated to stakeholders and other relevant people in written format. Even though written specifications can be meticulously detailed, they suffer from a major drawback: they are still written. No matter how effectively and regularly the development team communicates with the stakeholders, different groups are bound to have different mental images of the system being produced simply because written requirements leave a lot of room for imagination.

There is a simple and cost-effective solution to this problem: using low-fidelity wireframes which capture functional design, interaction design, and information architecture. In other words, these prototypes provide insight into what a system does, how users do those things, and how the users find the things they need to do. As the design process goes on, the developers can create high-fidelity mockups to offer even more accuracy.

In my experience of visualising 100s of ideas at Geeks, this has been a vital element in bringing clarity to the teams and helping the change agents to implement software systems or launch new products.