BearList was a semester-long group project for i213 (User Interface Design & Development), created by fellow iSchool masters students Travis Pinnick, Jon Hicks, and me. The end product was a usable prototype for a mobile application intended to aggregate user communications (SMS, email, and phone conversations in a single location) and allow users to geo-locate friends on a specified contact list.

The project involved a number of design steps over the length of the course, including:

• observation of mobile device usage
• conducting contextual inteviews
• building work models to describe the intended usage of our product
• constructing hypothetical usage scenarios
• storyboarding
• lo-fi prototyping
• creating usable prototypes on mobile devices
• user testing with specific tasks for prototypes
• heuristic evaluation
• design iteration

Artifact Model for a Blackberry Pearl, initially the focus of our project.

Flow Model for mobile device usage, used as a starting point for our design ideas

A sample storyboard for one of our scenarios for how the product might be used.
In this case, the user is using his geolocation features to find a local establishment.

The BearList HTML prototype, in use on iPhone Safari.

The BearList main menu, as created for Android.
Android development did not proceed, but
we created this as a proof of concept.