As a User Experience designer I’m responsible for providing design specifications to engineers. Sometimes the design problems are easy but more often they are complex and difficult to visualize. As designers we’ve latched onto some tools to help us communicate our ideas to our stakeholders. We use wireframes, mock-ups, omnigraffle/visio UML diagrams, comics, Powerpoint and a few other techniques to convey what we mean.

Here’s the problem: If you’re using a different tool, and designing without input from users then you are doomed to fail, or at least have a major communication breakdown eventually.

Have you ever read a book and watched a movie made from that book? Remember back to how different it was in your mind than how it was interpreted on screen. There are hundreds of pages with fantastic descriptions and still the interpretation can be so far off from person to person. That’s why it’s critical to get ideas into a working state as quickly as possible.

It allows the user to soak in the idea and start concentrating on the details. What if it did this? How does that work? Where do we collect this data? All important questions to be answered early. The user can’t start asking those questions unless they can interact with the interface, play with things and exploring. That’s where they prototype comes in.

Learn to design quickly, allow for full uninhibited feedback then iterate. That will give you the best chance at a successful, usable product.