Jewish History Museum Exhibit

GOALS

Design and build a public facing interactive display in a museum.

The curator of Tucson’s Jewish History Museum hired me to design and develop a touch-screen exhibit that would showcase cherished objects of the city’s prominent rabbis.

OBSTACLES

The user experience for the final product would only possess touchscreen interactions and be displayed on a fixed screen size.

Using a touch screen monitor posed an unfamiliar set of challenges. Special considerations were made for use of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to build a custom interactive display to be delivered through a browser.

I was responsible for finding a free solution for presenting the exhibit in a “kiosk” mode which restricts user interaction outside of the controlled, intended experience.

Finding a unique layout that gave equal hierarchy to each item led to a lengthy exploration process

Finding a layout that was compelling enough to attract museum visitors, conveyed the curator’s message, and did not overemphasize one exhibit item over the others was a formidable task.

SUCCESSES

A suitable browser extension

I was able to track down a free chrome browser extension that accomplished the goal of presenting the exhibit in kiosk mode. It was easily implemented.

An irregular grid with a rotating hierarchy

I encountered exciting options for grid layouts through design research. The final result was a random arrangement, formatted through the use of CSS grid rules. However, through experimentation, it was felt that the design would be more impactful if some items were more prominent than others. This gave emphasis to those items unnecessarily. The solution for this was to intermittently randomize the order of the objects through a timed JavaScript function — creating equal odds for each item to appear larger than the others over time.