I got back to working as a consultant when I joined Nitobi. I was offered the opportunity to establish a solid user experience practice for the thriving consultancy, and to act as a leader to an existing team of two excellent designers. The work Nitobi was doing at the time was very focused on mobile, being as how the company had worked to create an open source project called PhoneGap—a framework which works to allow developers with web development skills to reuse those skills to build mobile applications.
Wikipedia already had an existing iOS app built with PhoneGap, and came to Nitobi to help with the design and implementation of the Android version of their app. As PhoneGap was created to allow developers to build for many platforms, this was a common request that came our way at Nitobi.
A relatively quick (1 month, start to finish) project, I used the iOS app as a basis for understanding the required functionality to be included in the Android version. The goal was to maintain the Wikipedia brand, while taking into consideration the interaction differences between the two platforms—hardware buttons and notification dialogues, as examples. I worked entirely with mock-ups for this project, starting with a few potential approaches to navigation that was vetted by the client and tested with a select group of users.
Iterations/options for potential approaches to the top navigation bar.
After the best approach to navigation was determined, I worked through creating the various necessary mock-ups and states, along with a user flow diagram.
A sampling of some of the screens mocked up for the Android app.
User flow diagram for the Wikipedia Android app.