Paper Prototyping a Social Mobile Service

Methods for design and evaluation of interactive applications are not readily applicable to mobile services. By modifying an existing paper prototyping method we evaluated a mobile social service for providing user-based tips in a shopping mall. The evaluation showed that tips can be pushed to users and that they can accept that a complex user interface is presented on a small screen. Although the evaluation took place in an office environment, we received feedback on functionality of the service in the context of the shopping mall. Our evaluation indicates that simple prototyping techniques can be used for informative evaluations of mobile services that are heavily context dependent.