Hi Gregory,

Prototyping and/or other related techniques (storyboarding, mockups, etc.) are extremely effective in communicating with the stakeholders and the end users.  Text-only requirements cannot be used by themselves to ensure that the business analyst and the development team have a solid understanding of the business needs and the confidence that the proposed solution will meet those needs.

I have worked with many projects where something similar was used with great results, here are some ideas:

• On a very large scale project I've worked on which called for creating a brand new system, the business analysis team gathered the requirements via JAR sessions for about 1/2 a day and then used the second half to create mockups of what the solution might look like.  The next day the mockups were reviewed with the business stakeholders which helped to both clarify the requirements and to ensure the solution is one which meets the business needs.  This process was repeated a number of times until the entire system solution became to emerge with "built-in" buy in from the stakeholders.
• On a different project, the business analyst gathered the requirements and then worked with the programmer to create a prototype using basic HTML.  Basically there was not database behind the pages just ability to click on buttons and to see what the screen might look like after the system would perform a given action.  This worked well in presentation to higher-level executives.
• And yet on another project, which asked for changing an existing system to meet new requirements, we used a storyboard type presentation in Power Point with call outs of the changes to be made to the system.  The business stakeholders were easily able to understand the solution and validate that we were on the right path.

There are many other variations and ways to visually show your stakeholders the proposed design: create wireframes using Vision, use a whiteboard to brainstorm with the business stakeholders, use an electronic white board to capture your designs from JAD sessions, create screen mockups to be used both in presentations for stakeholders as well as in functional specification documents for the programmers.

In addition, there are now tools specifically designed for the business analyst to create prototype which helps the business to visualize what the app might look like before it's built.  One such tool is iRise.

Hope this helps!

- Adrian