Project Overview
National Instruments Corporation, or NI, is an American multinational company with international operations. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it is a producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software. Common applications include data acquisition, instrument control, and machine vision. In 2016, the company sold products to more than 35,000 companies with revenues of US$1.23 billion
Tools: Adobe Creative Suite
Responsibilities: Interaction Design, Motion Design, and UI Visual Design
Year: 2019
Company Website: National Instruments Website
There are two exhibits in the Founder’s Hall room. Left: The Digital Timeline representing the present and timeline history of National Instruments. Right: Artifact Explorer which represents the past.
Responsibilities
I am tasked to design the production phase for the National Instruments’ Founders Hall. The Founders Hall’s primary function is to show the history of National Instruments (NI) and celebrate the company’s 42-year long history through enticing information and artifacts. This includes 2 types of exhibits: Digital Timeline, and Artifact Explorer.
UX and Interaction Tasks
Identifying the spatial design of the exhibit including designing for accessibility. For this project, an accessibility mode that shifts the entire UI of the screen which fits the ADA standards for museums. I had to make sure the content works well and less confusing when the users select the accessibility mode for both exhibits.
UI, Visual and Motion Design Tasks
I also worked on the limited palette and strict guidelines of the “sci-fi” theme from the client. The request was to create a modern-esque Minority Report theme. One of the trickiest parts is establishing a sci-fi effect for a white background and also making it look crowded at the same time making sure that the UI designs are all coherent with the content.
Artifact Explorer
The Artifact Explorer allows users to explore the 15 significant artifacts from the NI history.
Visitors can look into the case at the objects themselves, or they can use a moveable touchscreen to interact with a virtual version of the artifacts. Each artifact contains images, text, and videos. I was tasked to work on the entire Interaction design, Visual and Motion design as well as UX problem solving along the way.
Digital Timeline
The Historical Timeline interactive is displayed on a 5 x 75" touchscreen.
The digital timeline has 4 thematic threads. The threads are: NI’s History, World Events, Customer Applications and Engineering Trends. The timeline begins in 1976 (the year NI was founded) and ends in 2019. The timeline has 2 interactive modes: Multi-User Mode and Presenter Mode. Multi-User Mode is the timeline’s default state where users can explore the historical timeline of NI. The presenter mode lets the screen on the far-left becomes the control panel for the presenter to navigate the timeline and select event nodes to expand. The other 4 screens reflect what the presenter is doing.
