04 Mar 2007 1116H

Exploring Wilshire Blvd

Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd, Home Page

By way of my friend Kevin, I’ve been reminded of this site, Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd., designed for the LA Conservancy by Hello Design, which, if memory serves me correctly, rose out of the ashes of one of the first superstar web shops called cow., in Santa Monica.

Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd, Detail Screen

Going even further back, back in late 1995, early 1996, I was learning how to assemble websites in Adobe Photostyler SE and HotDog Pro on a cranky 486SX/25MHz computer running Windows 3.11 with 8MB of RAM. At that time I was enrolled in the history and hypermedia class at UCLA, taught by Jan Reiff, who recently edited the Encyclopedia of Chicago, which is accompanied by fantastic site. One of our groups did this assignment, driving up and down Wilshire Blvd, which connects the westside to downtown, and mapped the Asian American influence on Wilshire. There was some pretty interesting stuff there, certainly, but not quite as flashy.

Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd, Help Screen

In this presentation, one thing I really like about the interaction design, which we tend to overlook in designing apps, is the presence of introductory help dialog boxes or “first time user” help. These boxes really do help offset the user’s discomfort, who may expect some guidance initially around the question “where do I start first?” and thereafter opt out of the help altogether or might choose to invoke contextual help only. The whole thing has a kind of Second Storyish kind of feel which is great in terms of engagement and information design.

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