Re-imagining the Houston Zoo
We were contacted by the Houston Zoo to help bring their digital presence up to date. The Zoo had so much content and information that needed to be displayed in a more clean and easier way to navigate with clear paths to the content. With content spread across animals, shopping and conservation, the site needed to be organized in a way that made finding things simple yet showcased all the great content and things going on at the zoo.
We designed and developed a responsive site for the Zoo for multiple screens. The design took a new approach to layout and was a re-thinking of the traditional Zoo template that takes advantage of a scalable grid of content showcasing the multiple things going on at the zoo. We implemented a grid design mixed with photography and branded color blocks to highlight areas of the zoo like store, careers and events. A refined color palette was used throughout the site and curated imagery filled in the grid.
In addition to the main site we also redesigned the zoo stores, a conservation site to educate users on the conservation efforts at the zoo, and finally, a kids site and game. The entire site and other sites were created and build on a back-end Content Management system for the Zoo to be able to update the site in the future.
The new look won industry awards and garnered the zoo much recognition in the industry for breaking away from the traditional layouts of most zoos. It was welcomed by the users and received a lot of praise from zoo visitors.
In addition to the the Zoo main site, we were also tasked with creating a Houston Zoo Kids Website experience. We created 5 worlds that kids could scroll through on desktop and devices. They could learn about animals in the wild, how the zoo helps them and about conservation. The experience was gamified so that the users felt challenged as they learned. We worked with a developer and an illustrator, Tad Carpenter https://carpentercollective.com who did all the illustration. The result was a fun interactive tour of animals and conservation and also a hub of other useful information for kids and ways to prep for their zoo visit.
For both the website and the kids interactive experience, we created a number of useful UX documents, including, wireframes, sitemaps, user flows and interactive storyboards. These were all guides to illustrate the concept and UX experience to the client.
The layout was based on a 16 column grid system and made to collapse gracefully. Dynamic imagery was shot to bring the animals to the page and iconography was used to compliment the photography. .
