US Department of State
Product Design, Web DesignThe Diplomatic Reception Rooms are a series of physical rooms containing historical objects, in the US Department of State in Washington, DC. The team at Bluecadet was contracted to create three bespoke interactive online experiences for the new Diplomatic Reception Rooms website.
Approach
As the DRR was diving into a new website redesign, they wanted to create interactive experiences to help tell the story of American Diplomacy for students and "history buffs." The contract required that the experiences include Interactive Timelines, Online Exhibits, and User Collections.
Collections
Collections is designed to allow website visitors to explore the DRR's collection and create personal groupings of items. Think: Pinterest for historical objects.
Online Exhibits
Online Exhibits are designed to allow the DRR to tell more focused stories using engaging, interactive experiences throughout.
Interactive Timelines
Interactive timelines are designed to teach the broad History of American Diplomacy in a comprehensive, interactive way.
Interactive Timelines
Interactive Timelines accommodate and repurpose the content A Short History of the Department of State to better tell the History of American Diplomacy.
In order to accommodate such a large span of history (1607–Present), we designed an ecosystem of timelines that allow the DRR to create Individual timelines for "Eras" in history, which can then be grouped, and experienced individually or sequentially by website visitors.
This strategy also helped the DRR have a larger breadth of content at launch-date, while also teasing out future content to come.
Online Exhibits
Online Exhibits were designed to allow the DRR to tell more focused stories using engaging, interactive experiences throughout.
Online exhibits function as immersive experiences, designed to tell focused stories of American Diplomacy. Exhibits leverage various interactive patterns to tell stories in an engaging way.
Collections
Collections is designed to allow website visitors to explore the DRR's collection and create personal groupings of items. Think: Pinterest for historical objects.
Collections allow people to save and group items from the DRR's collection of historical objects. The DRR is able to create public-facing collections to better curate their objects. Users are able to create their own collections, or duplicate DRR-created collections.
Details
Deliverables
User Journeys
Wireframes
Prototypes
Usability testing plan
Usability testing report
Final DesignsTools + Software
Figma
Airtable
Google Docs and Slides