Urban Insight

Background: The Broad is a contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. The museum offers free general admission and presents an active program of rotating temporary exhibitions and innovative audience engagement. The Broad provides a free mobile app designed to be used in-gallery for audio tours and maps. Challenge: Upgrade The Broad's outdated and unwieldy iOS and Android apps. Provide a solution that is lightweight, easy to maintain, cross-platform, and visually and functionally consistent with their updated online brand and website design. Solution: Urban Insight and The Broad reimagined their mobile app as a static Progressive Web App. By utilizing the modern web framework Gatsby.js, and integrating their existing Drupal 8 website as a dynamic data source, we created an engaging in-gallery experience for museum visitors. The Broad Mobile App offers on-demand audio tours, an interactive map, public tour information, and rich details about all artwork in the collection that is currently on view. For museum staff, we streamlined their content workflow. They are able to easily keep the app up-to-date since all content and configuration updates are performed on their existing Drupal website. Read More

The client is an investment management firm that specializes in managing global, international, and emerging market equities. The global financial services firm and Urban Insight developed several intuitive web applications built in Angular that seamlessly integrate with the financial services firm's proprietary investment performance algorithm. The web apps are optimized for tablets and provide a user-friendly interface for analyzing individual or multiple funds, displays fund recommendations and comparative fund predictions, and provides interactive graphical charts with up to 10 years of historical data. Read More

The City of Los Angeles—the second largest city in the United States—is comprehensively revising its zoning code. First adopted in 1946, the Zoning Code’s overall structure has remained the same, while the needs of the City have changed drastically. The City is devising a new zoning code to help meet the challenges of a modern and rapidly changing city and realize the needs of a 21st Century Los Angeles for all stakeholders. Drawing on its years of experience intersecting urban planning and technology, Urban Insight worked with the City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning to develop a set of public participation tools and create a new model for a web-based zoning code. The first of its kind, the new web code will allow residents to answer a series of questions to create a customized and streamlined version of the code for their specific property and needs. The public participation and engagement tools were awarded the "Best Use of Technology" by the American Planning Association, Los Angeles Section. The zoning code website was awarded the 2017 “Smart Cities Award” by the American Planning Association. Read More

Planetizen is the most-recognized and loved brand for the urban planning and design community in the US. Urban Insight created Planetizen Courses to provide online education opportunities covering a wide range of practical tools for urban planners, urban designers, and civic enthusiasts. It accomplished this by developing an e-learning platform using the Drupal content management system — one that could handle the challenges of delivering high quality, streaming video to a wide audience and support online payments and subscriptions.  Planetizen Courses subscribers can browse a library of courses by topic, track course progress, take course quizzes, and earn and share certificates of completion.  Urban Insight works alongside Planetizen staff to plan, record and produce the weekly hour-long video courses in the green screen video recording studio in Urban Insight’s Los Angeles office. Read More

Kennedy Wilson (NYSE:KW) is a global real estate investment company that owns, operates, and invests in real estate. Kennedy Wilson wanted to unify their corporate website with a new visual design and implement a flexible content management system to optimize content for mobile and tablet devices, to quickly deploy new website features, and to enable distributed management. The new website uses an open source content management system to enhance Kennedy Wilson’s global reach. It showcases Kennedy Wilson's history with an interactive timeline, enables fast and easy content discovery with a site-wide search, and strengthens their brand on all devices, due to a beautiful mobile responsive design. Read More

The Japanese American National Museum (JANM)  is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to sharing the experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Urban Insight led a comprehensive website redesign, executed a new brand identity, developed a modern website platform, and architected a new online collections integration. Urban Insight engaged the community, JANM staff, and stakeholders in a highly successful design process that resulted in a beautiful and consistent new website design. Read More

The Broad is one of the nation's most prominent contemporary art museums, founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.  Urban Insight and The Broad redesigned the visual and user experience to immediately engage visitors with The Broad's world-class collection of postwar and contemporary art. Recognizing that a significant proportion of The Broad's visitors first experience the museum on a mobile device, we optimized the experience for mobile users. A series of workflow tools enable The Broad team to update all aspects of the website to quickly publish news, events, and information about new exhibitions. Read More