Transforming museum navigation

Opportunity

The journey breaks
before the visit begins.

For most visitors, the experience of the Natural History Museum starts long before they arrive. Planning what to see, where to go, and how to make the most of a visit should build anticipation. Instead, it often creates uncertainty. The scale of the museum, combined with fragmented information and unclear structure, makes it difficult to form a plan with confidence. By the time visitors walk through the doors, they are already navigating complexity.

The opportunity was not just to improve wayfinding and pre-visit planning for the museum, but to rethink how the entire journey is understood from the very beginning.

Reality

Complexity leading to
confusion on the floor.

Behind the experience sits a highly distributed organisation. Multiple departments, multiple priorities, and multiple interpretations of the visitor journey. This fragmentation surfaces directly in how the museum is experienced, both before and during the visit. Information lacks consistency. Navigation lacks a shared logic.

Key pathways are missed entirely. What appears seamless on the surface is, in reality, a collection of disconnected decisions.

Alignment

Twenty voices. A single view.

Through a three day workshop, we brought together over twenty stakeholders across product, design, content, and leadership. Each group held a different perspective on how the museum should be structured and navigated. Mapping these views side by side exposed the core issue. Not a lack of effort, but a lack of alignment.

Before anything could be redesigned, the museum needed a shared understanding of how it should be experienced as a whole.

Approach

Navigation is not a layer.
It is the system.

We approached navigation as a structural problem that spans both digital planning and physical movement. Working collaboratively, we began reshaping the information architecture of the museum itself, aligning teams around a shared model of how content, space, and movement connect.

Rapid prototyping allowed us to test new patterns immediately, validating them with real visitors inside the museum. In a single afternoon, we observed how people with different levels of familiarity and accessibility needs interacted with the system. The insight was clear. When structure improves, confidence follows.

Outcome

From uncertainty to intent.

The result was a validated navigation prototype and a prioritised roadmap for how the museum can evolve its experience across the full journey. From planning a visit to moving through the space itself, the experience becomes more coherent, more intuitive, and more aligned. More importantly, it established a shared foundation across teams, reducing silos and aligning around a single vision.

Navigation becomes less about finding your way and more about enabling exploration, giving visitors the confidence to engage with the museum on their own terms.

Recent work