Strategy and User Experience for a geo-messaging app across iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

This is one project I'm extremely proud of. Working with a Toronto start-up, the CEO wished to redefine the interaction of sharing your location with your friends. The goal of this application was to create a pivot - on one side you had your social interactions (messages, social feeds, etc...), and the other had your location and the ability to find and share places to meet and do things with your friends. Both sides would then be transparent to one another, facilitating the easy communication of conversations involving location.

The application had numerous innovations, one of my favorites was the notion of multi-search: the ability to search for a bar that's close to a parking lot that's also close to an ATM (ie. the adding of multiple search queries).

As Senior Information Architect, my responsibility was experience strategy and design, as well as managing the expectations of the internal team. I was extremely lucky to work with an exceptional group of individuals, however the senior team came from a pc software background - meaning they were new to the simplified and streamlined experience required by mobile apps. One of my greatest learnings in this project was around the simplification of a value proposition to its core - and the ability to communicate, educate, manage and negotiate these conversations with the senior leadership team. Difficult at times, the passion won out in concept.

Unfortunately this project never launched. With the introduction of Apple's iMessage and Find My Friends products, funding was pulled.

Strategy // Information Architecture // Interaction Design // HTML Prototype

Information architecture and html prototype for new Canadian Business mobile apps. We built for both iPhone and BlackBerry platforms.

The experience was designed from the ground up to support multiple content brands. The idea being that a news brand could take the structure of the app, restyle in their own brand colours and launch simply. Canadian Business and Macleans (also included in this portfolio) were our two go-to-market brands.

Information Architecture (IA) // Interaction Design (IxD) // Wireframing // HTML Prototyping // Functional Requirements

Provided UX oversight and input in the development of the CityNews iPhone and iPad Apps.

The CityNews apps were innovative in that they were the first Canadian News apps to display local news and UGC (Your Stories) tagged on a map. It was a new an innovative way to engage with news.

Consultation & support with: Information Architecture // Interaction Design // Wireframes // HTML Prototype // Functional Requirements // UAT // Test Cases

Requirements gathering, information architecture and html protoytpe for a web radio player.

This project might appear simple - it's a radio player - but it proved to be one of the most complex architecture projects I've worked on. Instead of just being a simple radio player, the goal here was to develop a richer experience. One where a user has the ability to listen to the station, view the recently played (including the ability to purchase each song), access the on-air schedule, send personalities messages, listen to podcasts and live chat.

On top of that, all this functionality had to be available within a pop-up window, be scalable to 50+ properties ranging from music, to news and sports, all with their own functional requirements.

This was a wonderful project of working within tight confines - both of the experience and the stakeholders. I will still admit that the experience is too complex - there is too much going on. Each screen was not simplified to its' core purpose.

You can view the player online by visiting www.chfi.com and clicking 'Listen Live' at the top of the right rail.

Requirements Gathering // Information Architecture (IA) // Interaction Design (IxD) // Wireframing // HTML Prototype // Functional Requirements