IT House

1. Analyzing business

We try to understand the client’s business as much as possible. Our work starts by listening. We listen to your customers and try to understand your business, which includes defining the goals, learning about your brand, researching stakeholders and examining how you see your site or application developing over time. Great online experiences don’t just happen, they are designed from the ground up.

2. Information Architecture

Using the information gathered in the first step, we create a set of interactive prototypes, or “wireframes”, to help visualize the user journeys, test features and assumptions. These wireframes are based on user paths and are created in an iterative process. Organising how your website is structured, and how users find what they need, is key to the success of any design project.

3. Visual design

Our approach to design is both user centered and goal oriented, marrying the needs of the user to the goals of the organization. We work closely with our clients and their users to ensure the site design meets all of their needs and requirements.

4. Design adaption

Once we have completed the initial design concept we progress to the individual page and element designs. We estimate the need for approximately six generic page types or elements, although the exact number will depend on the results of the discovery and user experience design phases. This phase of the project overlaps with XHTML/CSS development.

5. Programming

After development of the design we program its functionality. In order to effectively and quickly achieve the desired results we use the Ruby on Rails development environment. We have chosen this environment after several years of development experience with PHP, Microsoft Studio, C++, Ruby on Rails, Python, Symphony development tools and environments. We have concluded that Ruby on Rails is much more efficient and more flexible for both programmers and users, therefore we recommend it to our clients.

SCRUM, small, agile teams

We adopt an iterative approach to design and development using methods such as Agile Scrum. The main reasons for this methodology: Lower risk, more cost effective for you, and it is easier to deliver a quality product in a short time.

We work in quick iterative cycles, producing working prototypes that we can test with. Doing this makes sure we’re on the right track every single iteration.

It is much easier for the customer and developer to agree on the necessary work tasks, if it is possible to try out complete functionality. The project is completed in as many sprints as necessary, and if during the project the customer discovers that an initially planned functionality is negligible, it can be easily deleted from the To Do list.

But the most important benefit from Scrum project management methodology is an ongoing focus on customer business objectives.