Comm Lead UX Researchers take The Museum of Flight to new heights

Would you choose to live in space?

That’s the question asked by the Museum of Flight’s new Home Beyond Earth exhibit, which helps visitors of all ages imagine what it would be like to live and work on a space station.

The museum wanted this flagship exhibit — which employs interactive touchscreens and RFID technology to let users build an individualized vision for their life in space — to function as seamlessly as possible for visitors.

That’s why they turned to the Communication Leadership Consultancy to provide ongoing user experience research as the exhibit was developed and launched.

Kevin Laird and Lori Cai were the two students who answered the call. Laird and Cai provided Usability Research, design and accessibility solutions, visual analyses of the UI, and collated the data into consumable chunks for the exhibit development team. Based on research conducted both online and on-site, they provided redesigns of the 5 UI systems using Figma and developed interactive prototypes to test the suggested improvements.

While their key target audiences were elementary school children and senior citizens, they had to ensure the exhibit’s UI was accessible by everyone regardless of their age, language proficiency, mobility, and visible abilities.

Home Beyond Earth debuted on June 8th, and within the first week the exhibit’s virtual space station already had over 1000 residents (visitors who had completed the interactive experience and imagined their life in space).

The exhibit will run through January 20th 2025.