Project overview

As part of the Whales exhibition at the Natural History Museum a light content interactive was planned to deliver information and recordings of Humpback Whale communication. The museum wanted an interactive that would delight and make best use of the content without overloading users with text. It was also defined in the briefing that the museum wanted an interactive that didn't just become a kiosk interactive with slides of content and audio.

I project managed this project alongside working on the overall conceptual design of the interactive to communicate to a junior designer to produce. As the project reached a conclusion I also managed developer sprints on the project and the interactive deployment into the museum.

Humpback Jukebox in action

Concepting & deployment

Working with the junior designer on the team I concepted the idea of the interactive taking the place of a Jukebox within the gallery space. Allowing users to select from various "Hits" among the Humpback population. We worked on various styles of jukebox before settling on a modern interpretation of jukebox fitting within the rest of the gallery graphic styles. It was determined during user testing that users resonated better with a newer style of song interaction via a cover flow style slider at the base of the screen. Whilst the designer worked on interface styles I created all animations within the interactive integrating audio provided and balancing this to fit with the gallery space.

As the designs and animations were approved i lead the development sprints with our development team creating a roadmap plan for the client and managing the process as we worked to each. Along the sprints I also conducted user experience tests to further back up our original experiments and to adapt to any unforseen issues. I conducted the final robustness testing and deployment packages into the gallery with the project launching in the summer of 2017 alongside the extremely popular Echolocation experience.