User-centered design (UCD) is really a simple, seemingly common sense, concept. Unfortunately, many web design companies ignore it, either thinking they know what's best for all users or perhaps that it's too expensive to utilize. The fact is that neither are true, no one person can claim to know what all users will need to accomplish their goals and UCD does not have to be expensive to be effective. Jakob Nielsen claims that UCD can be done on 10% of a projects budget (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on ROI).

What is User Centered Design?

UCD means that in order to design a computer system, or anything with a user interface for that matter, it is necessary to:

• Understand the customers goals, tasks, and needs
• Understand the client/business's goals, tasks, and needs
• Create applications that simplify and meet these goals, tasks,and needs

In other words, the people that use the system are the main focus of design. With what customers need being married to what the organization needs.

How does Lytis Interactive achieve these goals?

Our design process works in phases, many of these phases are repeated as designs are tested with our customers to bring certain issues to light. This is called iterative design, which is accomplished with the use of prototypes, lo-fidelity and/or high-fidelity. Different phases require differently types of prototypes.

1) User/Task Analysis:

At this point our main concern is information gathering. We need to find out what our client is thinking in terms of needs and objectives for the project. We need to determine who their user group(s) is, and what their goals and needs will be for the system. This is generally done through brainstorming sessions with the Lytis design team and our clients.

During this session a basic demographic description is created along with a list of assumptions outlining who we believe the user(s) to be and what they will need or want out of the system in question.

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2) Assumptions Verification:

After an assumption list and basic user demographic has been created we then need to test and validate these ideas. This can be done through several different methods:

• Contextual Inquiry
• User Interview
• Surveys
• Focus Groups

Once the assumptions have been validated the Lytis team sets out to create a user persona.

3) Personae & Scenarios:

A persona is a made-up, pretend user, based on our validated assumptions. This persona allows our design/development team a specific focus on who we are designing for. This persona should represent the main goals and needs of our user group. It's better to focus on a single user that represents your user group than to attempt to design for everyone. To design for an outlying constituency will put another speed bump of features and controls across every other user's road (Alan Cooper "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum").

Along with the creation of a persona the Lytis team also creates User Scenarios.