What the app lacks in breadth, it doesn’t make up for in depth. For single entries, the content is fairly cursory: one screen of text, the location, the phone (if appropriate), a linked map and one image. There is no narrative to link these assets together or to put them in any historical perspective. Indeed the long history of Beverly Hills is not invoked. None of our library’s historic photos are included. Why not? Why not have a history tab?

If the Visit Beverly Hills app’s personality won’t win any hearts, it had better appeal to the mind.  The good news is that functionality on balance is pretty good. The mapping from Google is intuitive. And assets can be mapped by category, across categories, and from within each asset window (as noted).

An option to map nearby same-category assets would be nice, though. Now, to see other nearby parks, say, the user backs out to the category list, taps the map icon, and then must mentally reference the location of that entry.

But bouncing around the assets list, individual asset screens, and associated maps reveals a usability bug: in single-asset map view the back button inexplicably shifts from its usual bottom left position to top left (which is the iOS standard it seems) but replaces the back button with a ‘categories’ button. Press it and it’s game over! You’re back to the home screen with your selected lists lost. Ouch. Worry not: at present the Visit Beverly Hills app is not so content rich that you can’t find your way back.

 Content Should Be King

It should be self-evident that content is king for any travel app, but unfortunately the Beverly Hills app hardly scratches the surface of our the cultural and commercial opportunities. Greystone is the only entry that provides about as much info as you might find in a Los Angeles travel guide (and more given the audio and video clips). The rest of the entries content is pretty cursory. Since it came to the market in November, it’s been updated once (in mid-December) and since then has not fattened up with content at all.

Has the city lost interest? Has the contractor moved on to other projects?

But the real shortcoming of this app is that there is no voice or personality here. The dark grey scheme and sans-serif type doesn’t pick up on the city’s familiar themes. It doesn’t put the shield front and center. Instead it’s bland and clinical – a Windows of GUI wrapped in the warmth of a black Dell box. (Full disclosure: I’m Mac all the way, baby.) The Beverly Hills app doesn’t feel like a travel guide as much as an inventory. Where is the joy of discovery?

When I think to the many travel guides I have used, the characteristics that come to mind are personality & voice, breadth & depth, legibility, and accessibility. A guide should cover these basics (they why, where, when, and how of each attraction) but the better travel guides stake a claim in one feature area or another. Fodors is the narratively-rich hardback of travel guides. They can read like a travel essay. Michelin sticks to a no-nonsense factual presentation but wows with depth and detail. It presents attractions like a Zagats guide. My beloved Berkeley guides were an accomplice in my quest to wring every excess dollar from my travel budget. Looking for a good hostel near the train station? They had it; Fodors and Michelin didn’t.

But my favorite was Richard Saul Wurman’s series of urban Access city guides. They put geography first by breaking the city into manageable pieces that made mental maps of unfamiliar territory much easier to form. Access Guides are icon-heavy, map-rich, and rather eccentrically vertical. They’re bibles of interesting facts but short on narrative imagery. They represent a just-the-facts-and-maps approach which made them my perfect travel companion. I still have all of my dog-eared Access guides, and even bought a handful of out-of-print guides off of Ebay to complete my collection. Restaurant listings might be out of date, but these guides are simply the best at making complex cities like Paris and Los Angeles navigable.

Beverly Hills App: Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

In summation, the Mobile Beverly Hills app is a satisfactory marketing tool but a less-than-satisfying guide that probably won’t long hold the attention of visitors. But it can be improved. In addition to the observations offered above, some suggestions for an update to make the Beverly Hills app more valuable include:

• Beef up the content with the entries that travelers expect: shops, restaurants, historic sites, and points of interest. Take a cue from the guides that curate a travel experience. This app should present a Beverly Hills experience. Let’s work with the CVB to load this app with attractions from their list.
• Flesh out a picture of Beverly Hills that makes it seem more like a real city. Identify hangouts and nooks that locals frequent. Give visitors a reason to remember the city beyond that photo of the stairs at Rodeo or the celebrity sighting.
• Establish our history. Call on amateur historians or Hollywood enthusiasts to contribute short pieces (like an encyclopedia) to remind us where we came from and why its special. The Will Rogers Park entry tells us more about city improvements (“new energy-efficient security lights”) than it does about the man and his connection to the city.
• Make this app useful to locals. And that means more than parking garages, firehouses and parks. Give us useful information about city services (the city offers summer recreation classes, doesn’t it?). Tell us something about this place that we might not already know. Surprise us. Shouldn’t discovery be the point of an app like this?

Most importantly, thematically and geographically link these entries. If I’ll be at the Paley Center (not listed, by the way!) and I want to find a nearby bookshop (also not listed) or perhaps a cafe (sorry), it would be nice to generate a list or map of nearby entries by chosen category from the entry I’m viewing.

Were bike racks included in the parking section, for example, I would anticipate viewing the Roxbury Park entry and with a tap learn where the closest racks are. Likewise, if I’m planning a trip to Greystone but will meet with friends at the lovely Coldwater Canyon Park (listed but only 32 words to do it justice), it would be nice to be able to map other parks from that entry. (Oddly there’s a space where a map icon might comfortably fit in the dock in the entry view, but it’s empty.) At present, I can only map nearby parks from where I stand.

Slapping the shield on an iPhone app is a relatively inexpensive way of extending the city’s brand into the mobile arena. It puts our hat in the ‘smart city’ ring, one of our former Mayor’s priorities, and it may yet gain traction with the younger generations who reach for their phones like second nature. And if it brings a bit of gloss to the city, or brings in a few new visitors, all the better. (Compared to our tourism budget, after all, it’s a drop-in-the-bucket.)

Addendum: It’s Par for the Course

But we have our work cut out for us. The Mobile Beverly Hills app is hard to find in the App Store unless you search for the exact name (“Beverly Hills iphone app” won’t do it). It’s even harder to find linked from our own city homepage. Follow Government > Information Technology > Mobile Apps and the page load freezes with a 404 error. Back up to Information Technology’s page and click on Mobile Apps > Visit Beverly Hills (not even the correct name of the app) and you’ll land on a page with outdated screenshots and…wait for it…no link to the app store.

Honestly, fellas, can’t we do better than this? Doesn’t anybody in City Hall use our website? Isn’t anybody hip to the value of ‘eating the dogfood‘?