HMB Mobile

For my bachelor thesis, I created a mobile web app for the local historical museum. The requirements were that visitors are able to gather further information about museum objects, about the museum itself and use their own smartphone as a tour guide to play audio files. The whole page had to be multilingual for visitors from around the world and be user-friendly for all kinds of demographics. It was decided against the use of a native application because of distribution dependencies and the amount of work to develop for multiple platforms.

The idea behind the concept was to have a simple interface and let the content be the center of the web app. Colors were chosen to better distinguish certain parts of the web app, like banners, content, navigation, and side panels. Because of the whole ergonomics of how people hold a smartphone, the navigation was placed at the bottom of the page so that it can be accessed easily with the thumb and make the page usable with one hand.

As a CMS to create, edit and store content, WordPress was used with a few additional plugins to achieve the needed requirements. On top of that, a new WordPress Theme was created together with jQueryMobile to optimize it for mobile devices and touch input. Additionally, specific Media Queries were written to make the design responsive and use the bigger canvas of bigger-sized smartphones and tablets.

The final product is currently on route to be used for the first time in November 2013 for a special exhibition within the historical museum in Basel.