Subcommittee reviews digital exhibits; timeline and kiosks move into software development

The subcommittee received a progress update on the project’s digital exhibits, including the Foundations of Progress timeline and the building’s capital kiosks, which the designers said are tracking to be completed in early July.

Design leaders said the digital interactives have moved from UX wireframes into user-interface design, and into software development and testing. The team reported that they are integrating approved content into a content-management system so reviewers can see copy and imagery in context and identify layout or cropping edits during iterative reviews.

Project presenter Emilio said the team has “taken the UI design . . . into software development,” and described a workflow in which testing reveals UI edits, missing content and bugs that are then corrected in the next build. The team described a 60% review currently underway with the core team, followed by a subcommittee file-stage submission and later a 75% review for the subcommittee.

Designers demonstrated an early build of the timeline app that uses an image carousel, decade color bars and animated navigation; they also showed how kiosk screens will pull meeting and legislator data directly from legislative databases for near-real-time updates. The kiosks are intended to serve as wayfinding tools and to display exhibit locations, meeting times and legislator bios that the team said will repopulate automatically when the underlying website database updates.

The presenters cautioned that what the subcommittee saw was a work in progress: imagery, copy and animation were still being refined for readability and to prevent artifacts such as hyphenation or cropped images. The team said videos intended for gallery pages will open in a large player that currently occupies about 85% of the screen; a decision on final sizing will be made once the videos are available in context.

Subcommittee members raised content-placement questions for the timeline, including whether a story commonly called the “Black 14” should appear in the Foundations of Progress timeline or instead be told primarily by the University of Wyoming. Wendy, a committee participant, said the historical society and content team would revisit that placement and that omitting the story from the timeline would mean it would not appear elsewhere in the capitol exhibits unless intentionally added. The design team said they would return revisions through file stage for the subcommittee’s review.

Designers said they will send links and file-stage decks to subcommittee members and keep individual review windows open for roughly one week per submission. The schedule includes follow-up reviews to allow the subcommittee to comment before the project advances to subsequent design milestones.