We are currently working with a mobile telecoms platform provider to help customise their point of sale product for use by an Albanian mobile operator. It’s a complex project and has a large delivery team and as such good communication is a key factor in our success.

The team is approximately 30 people spread over London, Ukraine and India. The connectivity in some locations is poor, and couple that with no common first language, communication is often problematic using skype or the phone. The requirements documentation has posed their own challenges with document authors being unavailable having moved to a new project or sometimes left the company altogether.

In the early days, the result was that the team delivered a solution which was not what the customer wanted, not what the business analyst expected but which took a lot of hard work from developers leaving them somewhat demoralised. We realised pretty quickly that this wasn’t workable.

Our solution has been to use wireframes as our primary communication tool. They accurately capture the flow through the system, the expected input to the system and response to the user and are language agnostic. They have made a huge difference to how close to the customer’s intended outcome we are and everyone feels more empowered and enthusiastic as a result.

We’ve iterated a few times to reach an ideal set and to save you time I have listed them below:

• provide a high-level screenflow which shows navigation pathways through each screen in the wireframe set
• label each screen clearly, give it a title and author with contact details and make sure that is shown when they are printed
• publish them in a format which everyone can open (and which doesn’t get trapped by virus checkers) e.g. pdf instead of visio/html
• include annotations to explain functionality and show functionality over a series of pages in your wireframes e.g. an autocomplete before any text is types, offering options, selected option
• if there are subtleties e.g. alignment is deliberate, treatments are deliberate (for mandatories), make these explicit either in a separate set of UI guidelines or using annotations

I have also captured some comments from the developers and the client below, just to illustrate how it helps everyone.