Seattle Aquarium

Role

Visual Design Lead
UX/UI Designer

Duration

May 2018 - Jan 2019

Project Overview

With nearly 1 million visitors each year, the Seattle Aquarium is the most popular cultural attraction on Seattle’s waterfront. Seattle Aquarium’s outdated website was not able to serve its growing audience needs.

Project Goals

This project aims to redesign the Seattle Aquarium website with easy access to ticket purchases, memberships, and convenient checkout flow. The website should be educational and informational to reflect their primary mission to inspire the conservation of our marine environment. Flexibility and scalability are essential aspects of this project as content, articles, and information are continually changing and are maintained by the Seattle Aquarium team.

Understanding the Users

I was involved in the ideation process and sketched paper wireframes to identify usable features. These ideas are generated with the users in mind. The target audience of the Seattle Aquarium site was identified based on their current site activities through secondary research.

Inspiring and Functional

How does a child feel when they see an octopus swim or watch a clownfish pop out from its anemone house? My explorations convey a sense of wonder when people encounter the animals in Seattle Aquarium, how the animals may jump out of the box, overlap with the text, and paired with line illustrations to show the ocean's flow and movement. However, this idea was not easy to implement for the Seattle Aquarium team because of a lack of assets and resources to maintain.

As I took the inspirations further, wonderous moments are brought throughout the website. Visitors are greeted with a full-screen ambient video showing the wonder of the ocean floor and marine animals in a close-up. Wave motifs and color palettes are carried throughout. Information relating to the animals and exhibits is immediately accessible. Customers can plan their visits quickly and efficiently by featuring hours, ticket prices, directions, and the most critical pieces of information right on the homepage.

Tide Watch

Beach Naturalist Program is a unique program by the Seattle Aquarium to protect and conserve the Puget Sound beaches. More than 200 have volunteered to help people learn about and enjoy our shorelines during the low tides. The link to the program and the tide information are highlighted in the hero area. As the lead designer, I helped visualize, direct, and create the motion and interaction of the Tide Watch.

From the Sky to the Sea

To create an educational site, we created featured animals that live in the Seattle Aquarium. The animals are arranged starting from the ones that flies in the sky to the ones that swims in the deep ocean.

Usability Study

During our study, we evaluated an interactive prototype of the proposed Seattle Aquarium website design on a desktop computer and smartphone. The goal of the study was to evaluate the usability of the proposed design and to identify opportunities for improvement. While there are several opportunities to improve the overall user experience, there were no serious usability issues that prevented users from completing the high-priority tasks presented to them during the study. Participants were able to easily locate the most important information including Aquarium hours, directions, membership, and ticket information. 

After completing a series of tasks during the study, we asked participants to fill out a questionnaire rating their experience of using the website. We were pleased that the improvements on the site were proven to help the users

Easy to Maintain

To create a site that the Seattle Aquarium team can maintain and update in the future, I built parts of the design system. The pages are created with modules that can be reused in several sections. The modules are built in a Content Management System.

Checkout Flow

After finishing the website design, the Seattle Aquarium team want to extend the design to the checkout flow. I lead the visual design and made sure that the brand style is carried through the checkout flow.

Takeaway

The Seattle Aquarium team is thrilled with how the website turned out, and since its launch, they have already seen a 16% increase in new user engagement.