Design Exploration - We Choose the Moon (Aimee Robidoux)

The Flash-based site I found was wechoosethemoon.org, a website linked to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum site.

The site takes you through eleven stages of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, from launch to landing.  Each stage is an interactive scene, where the user can look at photo galleries and videos related to that particular phase, and listen to the actual audio transmissions sent back and forth from the mission control station and the spacecraft.  The user has the option to go through each phase in order, or, by using the Mission Tracker menu on the bottom of the interface, choose a stage from any part of the mission.

When the user first arrives at the site, there is an introductory page which gives instructions on how to navigate site.  A user’s eyes are immediately drawn to the center of the page (where the Apollo is), then left and right to the menus.  The eye stays longest on the Apollo, because the entire site revolves around its trip to the moon.

I thought the site very clearly conveyed it’s purpose, and was well-designed.  The layout is very simple, very facilitating to inexperienced users.  The buttons are very clear as to what they do and where they lead.  I saw no design elements that were distracting from the experience.

The site depends heavily on visual and audible information, with the animation of the space flight, and the mission transmissions.  There’s not a whole lot of textual information, but a lot of visual.  There’s no sense of clutter, everything is very sharp and clear.  In fact, there is an option to “clean up” the interface by making the menus retract.  The information is nicely packaged in little sections; some of it is only available when you click buttons on the page.

There is minimum typography differentiation.  It is all one font, but some of the type is all caps, the font size varies, and the type color in the Mission Tracker bar is blue instead of white.  The Mission Tracker menu bar is portrayed differently from the Mission Status and Transmission Menus, as it is an interactive image of the route Apollo 11 took, rather than text information.

The layout of the site is strongly aligned, with no design elements that are distracting.  Both Mission Status and Transmission menus are in close proximity to the Mission Tracker menu, and are directly across from one another. Everything is very uniform, categorized, organized.  The animation of the Apollo 11 is centered, but it doesn’t make it boring.  Everything is very balanced in terms of size and alignment.  This site has symmetrical balance (similar shape, size, color, weight, proportion, texture).  It is overlaid with dark tones, and brighter text: blues and blacks of the background, contrasted by white and light grey of the text.

The designers of this site were probably facing the problem of making the website interesting for adults, yet simple enough for younger people to enjoy as well.  For me, this site elicited a feeling of interest and fascination, and a bit of excitement as well.  Part of the emotional appeal is the running audio commentary from the original mission, which includes Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant step for all mankind” line.  It gives an atmospheric feeling that you, the user, are a part of the mission.  And I think that that is what the designers set out to do.