Opening new perspectives on American history.
The National Museum of the American Indian brings Native voices into classrooms across America through its Native Knowledge 360° Education Initiative. We partnered with the NMAI NK360° team to tell the stories of the “Code Talkers,” a group of Native American heroes from WWI and WWII. We reimagined NK360°’s outdated interactive to create a fresh website with a modern, responsive design and accessible content for teachers and students.
Architecture & Wireframes
Our team drew on 25 years of experience in user interface and experience design to create three wireframe concepts, each telling the story of the code talkers from a unique angle. We structured the site in chapters with simple, intuitive navigation. A vertical scrolling format kept text, photography, audio clips, and mini-interactives balanced and easy to digest.
Design
We presented multiple design concepts utilizing different palettes, textures, and patterns to explore potential moods and methods of storytelling for the final product. During these presentations, we worked with the NMAI team to plan and design interactive archival audio clips and images.
Coding
We built the final Native Words, Native Warriors site as a standalone set of code, which our team integrated directly into the existing NMAI/Smithsonian Institution domain. Throughout production and implementation, we prioritized responsive design to ensure a tailored user interface across all browsers and devices and accessibility compliance.
Content Production
To modernize the site’s historic content, we edited and sweetened the audio clips and resized historic images for modern devices. We then incorporated text and titles, created custom maps and illustration, and developed mini trivia games to help users understand how each military code drew from Native languages.
Classroom Resources
Following NK360°’s educator resource design guidelines, we created web accessible pdfs of each chapter for classroom use. We wanted to ensure that the online exhibition’s interactive content was as versatile as possible for educators and easy to incorporate into a variety of lesson plans.
Asset Gallery Tool
UI/UX, Design and Development, Instructions
To ensure that visitors could access and explore the exhibition’s vast resources, we created an Asset Gallery tool that allows users to filter searches by Chapter, Type of Media, and Person. We developed the tool so that the NMAI team could duplicate and easily implement the code across their website.
