For over three decades Science World has sparked curiosity and wonder in generations of visitors, and promoted science-related learning across British Columbia. Each year 3/4 million people engage with Science World’s programming, and 3 million a year visit the website. Its iconic status and passionate audience set a high bar for us as we set out to reinvent their online presence.
Highlights
Navigation
The core experience of Science World is simple, but the range of information around programs, audience needs, and resources is both deep and complex. Our biggest job was to find an information architecture that could hold all of that without overwhelming or feeling like a trip to the card catalogue.
We condensed everything into a tight, five item menu system. Each menu has collection of big colourful buttons that are inspired by Science World’s kid-friendly interactive exhibits, and lead to more information and details without leaving the page.
Build it with Blocks
As programs keep evolving and springing up at Science World, we took a building block approach to making new content pages. The staff content team is able to create pages with any combination of text, images, videos, and a growing number of interactive components. The flexibility allows pages to be high engagement spaces, or to hold a large amount of information without making the reading experience unwieldy.
Interactive building blocks provide space for quizzes, polls, image and map-based exploration, and more, with many appearing in the climate-science Change Reaction area.
Fun in Every Corner
Taking cues from the way Science World manages to inject some fun into almost everything it does, we added several features that build on that spirit.
Tidbits appear as small, glowing dots beside some text and images. When clicked they unfold into extra factoids and context that enriches the experience for curious visitors.
For some exhibitions, Science World commissions custom illustrations by local artists to appear as discoverable stickers. The stickers can be placed anywhere on the site, and remain across visits by the same person for up to 30 days.
Big Content Without Oversize Pages
The Science World team can produce quite a lot of information in different formats. We created several containers that allowed them to avoid spreading things across many pages, without needing to overload any one page.
One solution was the Content Navigator, a container with horizontally arranged tabs controlling a central content space.
Bundles were a later addition, built with mobile use in mind. Each bundle is a set of image-rich cards that can hold videos, link to other topics, and quizzes.
In addition to these features, a lighting fast custom search tool provides instant access to nearly every page on the site from just a few keystrokes. The team can choose to prioritize certain results for selected keywords, or hide pages from search results altogether.
A Brighter Tomorrow
Launched in December 2019, the site’s first real test was the holiday break. The site helped produce a 78% monthly and 40% year over year increase in online ticket sales. Visitors are spending more time on content-rich pages and less time moving through visitor logistics, and anecdotal feedback has been extremely positive as calls for information that’s already available on the website have dropped dramatically.
No matter the topic, Science World brings a sense of optimism and possibility to everything it does. We strove to capture that spirit in the website’s playful nature that also manages to hold myriad types of information for curious minds. It’s more than entertainment or education for Science World – the young minds they inspire today will be the science leaders of tomorrow, and we’re going to need them.