Brief
Dippy, the Natural History Museum’s famous Diplodocus cast, has left his home in London and is heading off on tour across the UK. We were tasked by the Natural History Museum to create a digital experience to support the tour and allow anyone that couldn’t visit Dippy in person to still experience the great outdoors with him.
Solution
Working closely with the Natural History Museum, we designed and built ‘Dippy’s Naturenauts’ – a digital experience that encourages children to get outside and complete challenges designed to encourage learning, experimentation and discovery.
Children are guided through the science and history by Dippy, with a little help along the way from his trusty sidekick, Fern the Fox. Users can also design and name their character that features throughout the experience and appears in a storybook generated from their adventures. All the characters were illustrated in-house by the immensely talented Lisa Juquet.
The stars of the show – Dippy, Fern and your own custom made character.
We conducted an extensive user experience phase, mapping out user journeys throughout the experience and wireframing all of the activities. We then worked with the museum to user test the initial prototype with families that have children in our age range (7-11-year-old).
To ensure that the experience was accessible to as many people as possible, we proposed a Progressive Web App (PWA) that brings app-like functionality to a website, meaning you don’t need to go via an app store.
Working with our new illustrations, I then built out the UI over the top of the wireframes to create a visual language for the experience.
The user interface was designed to be AA+ compliant, for the highest levels of accessibility.
