For over 75 years, Motorola has been an innovator in electronics and communications, and today is a global leader in wireless, automotive, and broadband communications. Motorola Museum and Archives maintains a rich collection of historical and business information that records the company’s technology, history, and culture.

Motorola Museum and Archives sought to develop an online, self-guided learning center by which Motorola employees across the globe could explore the company’s rich history through a digitized archive of textual, visual, and audio artifacts.

Thinkmap collaborated with Motorola Museum and Archives to create an application that immerses the user in a number of historical and technological perspectives. This context-rich environment increases users’ exposure to the diverse content and encourages each visitor to explore and learn more than a traditional interface would. Faceted browsing enables users to explore the content through its various shared attributes. And because there are a variety of ways to learn—timeline, spider map, educational interactive animations, text boxes—the application accommodates a wide range of learning styles.

Created with Thinkmap data animation software, the Motorola History Online application expresses the core values of Motorola through a history of its technology and business development. A Thinkmap timeline helps users clearly see the evolution of Motorola’s products, and a Thinkmap spider map uses kinetic, connected words and phrases to visualize the links between the themes, people, products, and places that have played a part in Motorola’s growth. The end result encourages users to find resources and learn from the site beyond their original objectives, introducing an element of serendipity that expands the breadth of exploration and empowers the user to employ the lessons from the past in current business dealings.