1. Project Overview
Reimagining the museum kiosk experience
The Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World exhibition at the National Gallery of Art explores how sixteenth-century artists and naturalists documented animals with scientific precision and imaginative curiosity. The in-gallery kiosk was designed to extend that sense of wonder, inviting visitors to explore delicate drawings through touch and storytelling.
When I joined the project, early testing revealed that visitors didn’t realize the kiosk was interactive. My challenge was to redesign the experience to feel more inviting, accessible, and aligned with the Gallery’s mission to inspire curiosity through close looking.
2. The Challenge
During early rounds of user testing, it became clear that the kiosk’s interface wasn’t communicating its purpose or guiding users toward interaction.
My focus was to make the interface more discoverable, intuitive, and playful. The design needed to signal interactivity while maintaining NGA's tone and brand.
3. Understanding our audiences
In collaboration with the National Gallery of Art's Visitor Experience and Interpretation teams, we defined three audience archetypes based on in-gallery observations and interviews:
4. In-Gallery Research
We conducted on-site usability testing with eight visitors over two weeks (August–September 2025).
Each participant explored one story on the kiosk while thinking aloud.
Many participants instinctively hesitated at the start, unsure if the screen could be touched. Once they engaged, they shared what excited them most:
"It’s so cool seeing details you’d never notice on the wall."
These sessions revealed key patterns in user behavior and informed the priorities for redesign—clarity, feedback, and delight.
5. Design Process
I began by addressing the usability issues revealed during testing, focusing on interaction and discoverability. My goal was to make the kiosk’s gestures and layout feel natural—something visitors could intuitively engage with rather than think about.
Working with design tickets from the NGA team, I explored new ways to make zooming, story navigation, and gesture prompts feel intuitive while maintaining consistency with the Gallery’s design system.
These explorations shaped the foundation for the kiosk’s full redesign—bridging early concepts into the final interactive experience showcased in the next phase. This process was repeated across six Jira tickets, addressing interaction, layout, and accessibility improvements:
Add progress bar to story pages
Precise positioning of caption box
Custom video controls and progress bar
Add color themes for accessibility
Make home screen look clickable
Add help screen for orientation
6. Iteration & Refinement
The first version of the kiosk looked polished, but visitors often didn’t realize they could actually touch it. During testing, one participant said,
“I thought it was just a screen showing the artwork—I didn’t know I could click anything.”
That simple confusion shaped the direction of my redesign.
My goal became to make the home screen feel immediately interactive and clear about what would happen next. I redesigned the layout so each artwork felt like a button that leads to a story, added short titles and time estimates to set expectations, introduced a bilingual toggle for accessibility, and refined colors and spacing to make the interface more legible and inviting.
7. Final Redesign
The final design creates a cohesive, touch-friendly experience that invites visitors to “look closer.” The home screen now communicates interactivity immediately, with visible story prompts, consistent iconography, and simplified navigation. The interface aligns with NGA’s visual language while remaining flexible for future exhibitions.
8. Key Learnings / Reflection
Designing for in-gallery experiences taught me how physical space shapes digital behavior.
Visitors bring the mindset of a museum — cautious, curious, often hesitant to touch — so clarity must come instantly.