For their 50th anniversary, NASA reimagined their site as an immersive, user-friendly destination that would bring to life the wonders of space exploration and decades of scientific achievement.
Collaborating closely with a UX expert, I led a tight, agile team to architect, design and develop this massive redesign in a few short months. The update was announced in advance to NASA’s immense and highly varied online community, creating intense excitement, discussion and anticipation.
The new site design proved incredibly popular. Site traffic nearly doubled upon launch and remained at that level for weeks afterward. The STS-122 Shuttle Mission feature experienced record-breaking online viewership.
Topics Navigation
A secondary nav menu directed users to key content areas that NASA wanted to highlight. I thought the defunct and much-loved “worm” logo was the perfect symbol to signal the history of the organization. NASA agreed and granted us a rarely-given green light to use the marque. Users ate it up.
Today, after several subsequent updates, NASA’s site retains many of the architectural and UX features that our team previously designed. In addition, while the site had eventually undergone a purple and white re-skin, they’ve since returned to a colour palette that reflects my original look-and-feel.
Posterity
Given NASA’s global impact on scientific and human achievement, a portion of this website build remains available online for historical purposes.
There are also numerous snapshots available through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.