WITH MOST ORGANIZATIONS now past the Wild West days of the Internet, many of them have begun to rethink their Web site strategies, focusing on long-term goals. In particular, the design of a site and the role it plays in shepherding customers is coming under intense scrutiny. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Nick Gould, CEO of Catalyst Group Design, forecasts what the next generation of Internet applications will require.

InfoWorld: What exactly does Catalyst Group Design do?

Gould: We're a user-interface design consulting firm. What that means is that we do site evaluations, a kind of UI diagnosis related to issues of general usability as well as effectiveness of the UI in the context of the specific site, customer, and business objectives.

InfoWorld: Can you describe this process?

Gould: Using Visio software, we create site schematics. Then we do user-testing sessions. Once we've satisfied ourselves that we're on target with the new interface, we take a step back and write what we call the UI spec, which is basically a very detailed link-by-link blueprint for how the site needs to be implemented to satisfy both customer and business objectives.

InfoWorld: What are some of the latest business objectives of your customers?

Gould: We're starting to hear more from clients, particularly companies that are sort of transitioning to business-to-business and ASP [application service provider] models, that designs need to be more flexible. If your strategy is to offer your functionality through somebody else's site or through a series of partner sites, in many cases you need to be able to adapt your design fairly easily to fit within multiple other interfaces. We recently completed a piece of work for a company that was a consumer destination site and, like so many others, was making the shift to a b-to-b model. We had to design an interface for them that basically worked as well sitting both on its own on a page and within the frame of another partner's site.

InfoWorld: How big an organization are you, and how do you compete effectively with companies that are much larger?

Gould: Right now we're five consultants, so we don't have the kind of pressure that these large end-to-end companies have on them -- simply by virtue of the fact that we're smaller. We're [in this business] because we really like doing it and because the principals and the consultants have a background and a passion for doing it. We think [interface redesign is] what's going to be important and needed in the next generation of the Internet.

InfoWorld: In the business-to-consumer area, we