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Little Burke

Gamifying the Museum Experience for Kids

Gamifying the Museum Experience for Kids

UX Design Project - Design Systems

March 2025 - June 2025

Seattle, Washington

Overview

How can we help the Burke Museum better engage with one of their key stakeholders, children aging from 8-12? In this project, my team of 4 designers deep dove into research to better understand the disconnect between this stakeholder group and the Burke Museum website. Based on extensive market research, user testing, and prototypes, we were able to create a gamified interface with a well-organized design system designed for the kids to bridge the disconnect between the museum's online interface and the children.

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Current State / Purpose

Why design a new interface for this stakeholder? Children who are a primary stakeholder for the Burke museum, have been neglected from the current primary stakeholders for their website. Prior to our user research, what do we know?

Images speak louder than text

The current Burke Museum website is clearly tailored towards an older audience. You can learn about upcoming events, the history of the museum (not current artifacts), and navigation holds a lot of intuitive design that children ages 8 - 12 don't already have.

Not tailored towards children

Knowing how well they have designed the actual museum for children, this website simply has way too much navigation and information for children to grasp full control on their own.

Informational vs Explorational

Children want to see the cool artifacts. The website holds information about programs, camps, and other information that the children themselves don't care too much about.

Research

Market Research

Market Research

We looked into three popular websites that have huge success when it comes to interactions with our target demographics. MetKids, PBS Kids, and National Geographic Kids. What we found was that these websites all have an interface dedicated towards our target audience. Additionally we found the following:

  • Usage of color to indicate and communicate rather than design

  • Simple designs throughout all pages

  • Most of components, if not all, are all interactable

  • Not a lot of scrolling / no traditional navigation bar

  • A lot of imagery + easy vocabulary

User Research / User Interviews

User Research / User Interviews

To better understand the needs of our primary stakeholders, we conducted several user interviews to what good design looks like from the perspective of children ages 8-12. We had them explore the current Burke Museum and observed their actions. We found that those we interviewed:

  • Clicked on everything. Whether the component indicated clickable, when using the mouse they liked to click.

  • Didn't use the navigation bar as the design had intended.

  • Not familiar with the concept of scrolling

  • Like tapping and pointing at the screen.

Final Design

Based on our research and findings, we ideated to design for a new interface dedicated for children to explore and interact. Our solution was a two-part solution:

  1. A website that held easy information for children to see what to expect/what artifacts they will see at the museum

  2. A sticker book for them to collect artifact related stickers throughout their in-person visit


Our website design intentionally included components all interactable for children and ignored website design norms for a more playful and fun experience.

As mentioned earlier, another outcome from this project included our design system for this new interface. We spent majority of our time designing components that focus on engaging with our primary stakeholder. Through many iterations, scrapping a ton of our designs, here are some notable components and styles guides used throughout our design.

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Reflection

Through multiple iterations and experiments on our final solution, this design challenge highlighted the importance of adopting a stakeholder perspective. Designing for children differs significantly from designing for typical web users; children may not find standard UI components intuitive. Recognizing this while developing our components made the process more complex than we initially anticipated.


Through endless ideation and feedback, we spent so much time iterating before landing on this design. Although imperfect and much to improve on, I am still very proud of the design we ended with as we learned to truly look beyond what we as designers want to prioritize what the stakeholders need.