I was the project manager and UX lead for the Everybody’s Lincoln–Get Lincolnized application. This application incorporates Flash animation, PHP, social media, and user generated content. I worked closely with Mightybytes and our marketing team to develop this application for Abraham Lincoln’s Bicentennial celebration.
The thought of creating the Chicago History Museum blog came to me during the making of our “Chic Chicago” exhibition in mid 2008. There were many interesting questions regarding the exhibition topic that could not be answered within the gallery space. A blog is the perfect forum to address these questions because of its reach, multi-contributor format, and casual tone. Instead of creating a specific exhibition blog, I designed it as an institutional blog. The Museum blog launched in late August 2008. We continue to think of new topics and recruit contributors to engage our audience. I can’t wait to see how it develops. The blog is powered by Apache, Wordpress, PHP, and MySQL working in perfect harmony.
I recommended the idea of using video to convey some of the stories the Chicago History Museum had to tell. Working closely with editors, educators, and curators, we were able to create the following video narratives and share them with you.
I managed the production of the following videos including:
Peter Alter, Curator
Encyclopedia of Chicago Tutorial #1
Jill Grannan, Curator
Chic Chicago: Behind the Scenes
Chic Chicago: Meghan Smith, Collection Manager
Chic Chicago: Timothy Long, Curator
Catholic Chicago: Parish Life
Catholic Chicago: Growing Up Catholic
Catholic Chicago: The Eucharistic Congress
I helped manage the redesign of the Chicago History Museum’s website during its rebranding phase in 2006. The Museum went from a static website of over 50,000 web pages to a User-Oriented CMS driven website. The redesign project took approximately one year to complete. I had the privilege of working very closely with three great teams to complete this project: Interface Guru for user-centered design, Design Kitchen for graphic design, and SPR/Redpoint for development and implementation. Since the redesign we have increased our monthly sessions/visits by 100,000.
Facebook:
Facebook is the latest social networking venture for the Museum. The interface of Facebook seems to be very well suited for organizations looking to appeal to a wider audience in a structured manner. We have taken what we have learned from our freeform content experiments on MySpace and applied it to our Facebook page.
> Visit the Chicago History Museum on Facebook
Flickr:
I set the Museum up with a Flickr account around October of 2008. It has become a great tool for the Museum in regards to multimedia. We have only touched the surface of potential Flickr provides. In the future we plan on diving deeper into Flickr by incorporating photo contests and providing user generated exhibition and website content opportunities.
> Visit the Chicago History Museum on Flickr
YouTube:
YouTube has allowed us to broadcast our video assets to a much wider audience than we could reach through our website. Our videos are received very well by the YouTube community and we continue to think of ways to take advantage of such a powerful tool.
> Visit the Chicago History Museum on YouTube
MySpace:
MySpace was the Museums first attempt at attaining a presence on a major social networking website. Working closely with Marketing and Membership departments we are in the process of restructuring our MySpace profile to approach a balance of user oriented content and institutional promotion content and design.
Enriquesportfolio.com is my online portfolio, I designed and developed this website to showcase my work. This site uses the WordPress blog tool as a CMS and a theme created by me.
Catholic Chicago is the first in a series of exhibitions of religions in Chicago at the Chicago History Museum. I managed the design and development of the online components of the exhibition. Along with the web editor I worked with Curatorial and Education to gather content and storyboard three multimedia essays now available online.
Great Chicago Stories is an award winning website that was finalized in April of 2008. Via the Great Chicago Stories website you can read historical fiction stories that illuminate Chicago’s past; use an Interactive History Map to look closer at artifacts from the collection of the Chicago History Museum and to explore locations throughout the city from each story; and as an educator you can build further on your experience with classroom activities. Great Chicago Stories content was developed in conjunction with the Chicago History Museum, Chicago school teachers, a national advisory board, and professional writers. The website was designed and developed with the help of Eduweb, Your Plan B, and the Chicago History Museum Education and Publications departments, which includes yours truly.
Sullivan at 150 years is a website launched in 2006 for a symposium celebrating the 150th anniversary of Louis Sullivan’s birth. I worked with the Museum’s Curatorial department and with outsourced developers, Your Plan B, to design and develop the website. I provided guidance regarding our style and standards as well as implementation support.
E-News is the Chicago History Museum’s e-mail newsletter, we redesigned E-News in 2007. I analyzed the usage reports for the previous version of the newsletter and presented my analysis to the Marketing department. Using the analysis report I created, the Marketing department and I worked very closely to develop the content and visual design of the current version of the newsletter. Since the redesign of this newsletter we have increased our click-through rate by 300%. Your Plan B generated the HTML and CSS based on our design.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago History website was launched in 2004. I was a member of the JAD team for implementation along with Northwestern University’s Research & Academic Technologies, Chicago History Museum Publications, Information Technology, and Research and Access. I am lucky enough to share an office with the Managing Editor of the Online Encyclopedia and we constantly bounce technology and multimedia ideas off of each other. The educational potential of this project is amazing and I am very excited to be a part of it.
Connections is the Chicago History Museum’s Intranet. I managed the redesign of Connections late in 2005. I performed user-analysis and developed the design criteria used to move from a series of interdepartmental developed static web pages to a CMS driven central communications portal and document repository.
© 2008 Enrique Gonzalez, CUA.