The National Park Service launched their official mobile (iPhone iOS) app in August 2011. It is available free from the Apple iTunes App Store as a 13.9 MB download. I’m reviewing the latest, 1.0.2 version which is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 3.2 or later. The National Park Service (NPS) has flyers available with QR Codes that make it easy for folks to download the app while on the National Mall. At just under 14 MB the app download does not take too long using a 3G connection.
The app starts quickly and on first use asks your permission to use your current location. Users will want to grant permission as this app is designed to guide you as you travel about the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC. The home screen brings up a rotating set of beautiful photographs of monuments with the NPS branding and navigation overlaid. The app has a strong visual appeal, good typography and uses the popular Glyphish Pro iconography. Rather than using a “More” as the fifth navigational element the designers decided to add four additional nav icon links as shown is the screenshot. This is a bit unconventional but it does work well in this implementation.
The Overview provides a good summary of the National Mall and Memorial Parks (NAMA). A minor quibble I have is they provide links to “our outdoor activities page to learn more” and a link to the NAMA website. Both webpages are displayed in a web viewer and are not sized for mobile devices (mobilized). Why send users of your iPhone app to your website? A better choice would be to offer the content within the NPS app itself.
You only get one chance to make a first impression and the NPS has done an outstanding job with their first app.
The Events and News feature pulls from a NPS feed, which is an intelligent method to keep the contents of a native iOS app up-to-date without requiring a new version in the App Store. The first News item caught my attention as it invites you to a “Public Meeting on Washington Monument Screening Facility.” However, clicking on the item does not reveal the date, time or location. NPS needs to think about adding more useful content to their News feed. The Events feed contains links with more details but I would have preferred to see the events in reverse chronological order. The oldest (October) events were on the top and the current upcoming events were near the bottom of the list.
The Postcard feature is fun and worked well. I was able to take a neat snapshot with the NPS branded boarder around the photograph. You can email the souvenir photo right from the app. I appreciate how the NPS designers were thinking about how and what their audience would want to do with this app, and providing a souvenir photo is brilliant.
The core of the app are the sites and monuments. The NPS provides several ways to discover our national treasures. Map and Sites are two direct methods. The later is an alphabetical listing of each of the locations. Clicking on any of the sites brings you to the details page of that site. The Map view allows you to explore sites via a Google Maps mash-up. It’s easy to use your fingers to scroll and zoom to see where monuments are located. Using this Map view you can see your own location relative to the monuments that are nearest to you (assuming you are on or near the National Mall).
Each monument has a detailed page that offers an Overview, Info, Album, Events and a button to add the site to your My Tour. This allows you to build your own tour of monuments to visit. The Album button allows you to view photographs of the monuments as well as historical figures and artifacts. I was pleasantly surprised to see that audio and videos of NPS Rangers are also provided in some of the Albums (see Lincoln Memorial). The inclusion of the audio and video was an excellent choice. The Rangers give their own personal statements on why a given monument is important to them. Ranger Elmi Kawther who is from Africa, had a heartfelt message on what the Lincoln Memorial means to her.
It appeared that the photos were loaded over the Internet which may help keep the size of the app small enough for a convenient download.
One feature that I would like to have seen – given the overall high quality of this app – is a way to “check in” to the locations I was visiting. Perhaps an integration with Foursquare would make this a truly killer app. If not Foursquare, then perhaps a checklist of sites that I’ve visited with virtual badges or pins as a reward for visiting a set of monuments.
Location-aware social features could work well with the Tours feature built into the app. The NPS pre-built five self-guided tours that give walking distances between each location. This is another really neat feature and instead of randomly wandering around the Mall, this feature allows you to visit sites based on theme or how much time you have available.
The Park Lens feature uses the built-in iOS compass capability. Holding your phone up to a location lets you augment what you see with additional content. Have no doubt, this is a technically sophisticated feature. It is clear that the iOS developers know what they are doing.
I did experience one app crash after watching a video. This is not uncommon for technically ambitious apps that are only a few months old. I suspect that user submitted crash reports will help to squish any remaining bugs. While hooking my iPhone 4S up to a MacBook Pro with XCode, the console logs suggested that the app checks to see if I had Twitter available for use, which was surprising as it doesn’t (yet?) integrate with Twitter or any of the other social networking apps such as Foursquare.
All in all, the National Park Service hit a homerun with their official National Mall and Memorial Parks iOS app. They are to be commended for not rushing and putting out a half-baked, poorly conceived app. You only get one chance to make a first impression and the NPS has done an outstanding job with their first app. I can’t wait to see what they do for an encore. Perhaps versions for other popular sites such as the Grand Canyon? We can only hope!
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Neil Bonner works in the information technology field for the Transportation Security Administration. His focus is on mobile, Rapid Applications Development, Social Media and collaboration platforms. He manages a portfolio of applications that are internal and citizen-facing. In 2011 he was recognized as a “
neil [at] michelangelo.com
