User Observations
While our problem area initially focused on use of mobile devices to save money, our user observations uncovered dissatisfaction with current applications that locate restaurants and events.  This discovery prompted a shift in our problem area, leading us to focus on improving and integrating existing services for locating food and entertainment.

Personas
To guide our design process and encourage empathy with potential users, we created a pair of personas from information based on user observations.  Our primary persona embodied a “typical” user of our application: young, professional, and tech-savvy.  Our secondary persona, a housewife and new iPhone user, encouraged us to consider the needs of more extreme users.

Initial Prototypes and Contextual Inquiry
We explored a number of approaches through our initial prototypes.  An early prototype provided the nutritional content of restaurant menu items.  After discovering the limitations of that approach and conferring with iPhone users, we shifted our focus to an application that allows users to plan an evening out by integrating existing services and APIs into one application.

Our contextual inquiry uncovered a number of areas where simplification was needed, such as the results page, and allowed us to form a few mottos that guided the rest of our design process, including, “Functional yet fun,” and “The fewer actions to the end goal, the better.”

High-Fidelity Prototype
For our high-fidelity prototype, I constructed an iPhone web application to mimic the interactions of an objective-C based program.  Though the application lacks database interactivity, the resulting prototype was sufficient for the development and deployment of a usability test.