National September 11 Memorial & Museum — Recording Booths Revitalization
Revitalized digital Recording Booths for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, with editable content, universal accessibility, and multi-lingual support.
For the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City, we were brought in to revitalize several of the digital experiences, including their Recording Booths. As visitors aged out of the original experience (some visitors don't have memory of or were even born at the time of the event), the experience needed an overhaul to improve the content to enable easy editing, improve accessibility, and improve usage of visitor-generated content in the museum.
We worked closely with the museum to design a universal experience that used the existing hardware foundation but transformed the experience on-screens, including:
Collaborative Design
Conducting upfront workshops to collaboratively define and design the new experience, including paper prototyping to imagine the experience before technology was built.
Infrastructure Modernization
Evaluating the existing infrastructure, documenting and modernizing it as needed to be more sustainable in the future and enable easier change.
Editable Experience
Implementing a completely editable experience, allowing the museum to actively change the content and questions in the experience over time. This enabled the museum to update the questions asked on-screen to capture new, fresh content that was projected into the viewing area outside of the recording booth.
Universal Accessibility
Designed a universally accessible experience that was completely eyes-free, enabling blind or limited vision visitors the ability to use the experience on their own, and included multi-lingual support for the museum's eight most common languages. This was not possible in the past.
These improvements enabled the museum to better manage and continually evolve the experience, making it more accessible to more visitors and improve engagement over time.
Content collected in the recording booths is submitted to an API endpoint and later compiled into videos shown in the Reflecting Theater — a menagerie of our collective experience of the September 11th events.