Museum of Science STEM Education for Families

Making STEM way more exciting.

families.eie.org

We elevated online introductions and PDFs into engaging learning experiences.

  • Experience Strategy

    We evaluate internal perceptions, user goals and best practices to find that “special sauce” that drives an actionable roadmap for your future experience.

  • In-Depth Interviews

    Climb inside the world of the user with structured interviews that bring their unique voices into the design process.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • Responsive Design

    We design for the future on today’s devices. Every element is considered for every size display to create an ideal experience for all users.

  • Prototypes

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Bringing the user experience to life with a fully-interactive artifact is a low-cost, high-value way to iterate without the investment of code.

  • Design Systems

    Good design will translate to a good design system — and vice versa. Build your brand with well-defined styles and components at the heart, and it will grow and breathe well.

The Challenge

The Museum of Science is a renowned educational institution located in Boston, Massachusetts. Through STEM-rich exhibits, presentations, and activities, visitors and students can develop a love for learning beyond the walls of a classroom.


The museum’s PreK-12 division supports this mission by creating educational products for schools and educators to enhance STEM classes and projects. They also offer free educational materials and activities through their website, EiE Families.


At the start of our project, the EiE Families website was a good place to offer PDF versions of the activities for students and their caregivers. The site had online introductions for some of these activities, but those online experiences could be challenging for kids, and there was confusion over the intent of the online version compared to the offline PDFs. We love the Museum of Science and, for us, the chance to make the online STEM experiences more exciting and engaging was about as compelling as it gets.

Activity screens take students through the engineering design process in an easy-to-understand way.
Activity screens take students through the engineering design process in an easy-to-understand way.

Our Approach

ZeroDegrees began with a comprehensive user research study of the program, interviewing and interacting with both students and caregivers together using a “Think Aloud” protocol. This encouraged participants to work through the flow of the prototypes while describing what they’re doing—and what they’re expecting from different interactions. Usability studies with kids are amazing! Feedback from 6-12 year olds help us step out of our own biases and see things from a different perspective.


Our sessions led to a number of recommendations that would make the experience much richer and more engaging. The EiE team asked us to design the changes, refine the experience, and optimize the design for launch. We knew everything needed to be highly accessible (of course), breaking down engineering design principles in a way that a 6 year old could understand (no problem), and work across platforms from web to mobile (naturally). And, like all of our UX projects, we wanted to ensure the content was coming through clearly, crafting activities that were both educational and entertaining. At the same time, we wanted to develop scalable, reusable patterns that EiE could apply to other activities down the road. Soon, we had a platform that was adaptable for everything from foundational science to computer programming and beyond.

Scalable patterns make it easy to work through any activity, on any screen.
Scalable patterns make it easy to work through any activity, on any screen.
The overall design structure is fully reusable to fit EiE’s growing catalog of STEM activities.
The overall design structure is fully reusable to fit EiE’s growing catalog of STEM activities.

The Results

The sentiment across the EiE organization was incredibly positive and receptive to the design changes. But, our greatest joy came from our early user testing when one young participant finished an online activity and said, “Huh. That was fun.” (Boom!)