[ninalanyon]

> Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth

That's the same fallacy as "A picture is worth a thousand words."

I don't know what kind of software everyone commenting here is writing but in my career my customers provided written specifications and technical standards for what the software should do.

Now quite often they were incomplete, or wrong, or even completely unnecessary but there is no way a phone call however long can substitute for sending back the spec. annotated to point out all the ambiguities, misconceptions, and alternatives. If there was enough certainty in the spec. I might write a small proof of concept mock up of what I thought the user needed (not necessarily what they asked for) so that we would have something concrete to hang our discussions on.

Now we have something to discuss but it's probably better done on a large physical whiteboard in person after which a revised specification will be written and we go round the loop again until we have it thrashed out in sufficient detail to do a real implementation. Drawing pictures on the whiteboard of the physical machinery that the software was designing all too frequently revealed that the customer had an incomplete understanding of not only the software but also the physics of the target design or occasionally even of basic geometry.