lovehistory.net

As I worked my way through The Lost Museum website and began taking down notes on my first impressions, I realized some of my judgments may be rather unfair considering the site was built in the early Aughts and therefore adhered to different standards and technological capabilities than the websites we work with today as users and builders. For example, the immediate music and sound that played the instant I wanted to view a (slow-loading, tiny) video is by now a well-accepted faux pas. I also felt irritated that I had to register to play the mystery game, and once there found absolutely nothing intuitive about how the game actually worked, even after having read about it. The interface felt heavily static and reminded me of educational games that I never found appealing. Because I chose to evaluate the hyperlinks linearly, I didn’t reach the lengthy, text-heavy How to Use This Site  page until after I’d been through the entire site, and when presented with that amazing chunk of small-fonted information, I didn’t bother reading it.

At first I liked the simple design of the site’s opening page, but working through the site it became clear to me that more navigation explanation, if not direction, would have benefited the user greatly. It did not have to be extensive. Also, the inconsistency in the sites design as a whole was jarring – the stark contrast between the spartan black design of the interactive museum pages and the white-backed, text-heavy archival pages and essays. I will say, I found the archival pages to be of the most interest, and to be the most useful. It’s too bad they aren’t the featured content on the site, or at least more clearly identified right off the bat.

It would be interesting to read a report on the site’s usage today, and I also found it interesting to experience the site after reading the article about its design. I almost feel that in attempting to give the reader too much freedom, the builders became completely disconnected from giving users adequate signposts, if not guidance. Also, the part of the site built on exploration of a three dimensional space still lacked a compelling narrative, and to me didn’t link to the archival content and historical essays other than being compiled in the same place. Further, it seems the site is attempting to appeal to a mixed audience, which is fine, but in the way the content is presented the site also seems to completely divorce separate audiences from each other. I’m not sure that’s effective in this case, especially without the aforementioned signposts.

Despite my criticisms, I think it’s a great synthetic effort, and a great attempt to take advantage of 3D virtual worlds to imbue them with intellectual content. Perhaps they needed to hire more game designers to help them with the process. This disconnect may be evidence of where we need to see more interdisciplinary work being done to build synthetic tools and online environments that combine different types of media and information into one satisfying whole.

It’s especially interesting for me to interact with this website as I work on my own design project and final project. My site centers around educational civil defense films, and I haven’t even begun to tackle how to embed the videos in my site in a way that will encourage viewing, let alone how to integrate the videos with a historical narrative. Further, how do I meet the challenges of getting my users to both watch the videos and interact with the narrative content? How do I even lay out my navigation menu? Which links take precedence? How many videos do I chose? How do I personally deconstruct the videos I watch? How do I translate my analysis into something readable for a lay and academic web audience?

Brown and his fellow builders asked the same types of questions as they built The Lost Museum and wrote the first successful edition of Who Built America?, but they captured a very brief moment in time when educational CD-ROMs seemed so appealing, perhaps simply because they were so new. They tried to build on the fleeting success of that format by transplanting it to the web, when what they needed to do was translate it. We struggle every day to catch up the changing uses and meanings of the internet. So my users will be familiar with YouTube, I expect, will they be willing to watch a video embedded in my site? In 10 years will historians such as myself be using similar techniques to allow our users to watch our motion picture sources (when not protected my copyright) or will that technique soon seem clunky and out of fashion? Or am I simply having my own unique user-end experience, one that has taught me what I’m going to try and avoid doing, anyway?