Navy SEAL Museum
Mission stories, a memorial, a pledge, and a piloting game, designed with the respect the subject asks for.
Overview
Four interactives for a museum about Naval Special Warfare. The subject asks for respect first, so every piece had to engage visitors without turning into entertainment.
The Navy SEAL Museum San Diego opened on October 4, 2025, extending the National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum from Fort Pierce, Florida. G&A was the exhibition and experience design partner for the visitor journey and interactive media.
I led UX on four pieces: Featured Missions, the Digital Memorial Wall, Cause Higher Than Oneself, and the SDV Experience. For the first three, I defined the visitor flows and wireframes. For the SDV game, I directed and reviewed the work of our subcontractor, NGX.
Many of the museum's guides are retired SEALs and Special Warfare personnel. The interactives sit alongside their first-hand stories.
What shaped the design
Each piece had a hard limit that set its structure.
- Short, standing visits. Featured Missions has no seating and little room for groups, so each mission targets two to four minutes for one visitor at a time.
- Three minutes to pledge. Cause Higher Than Oneself comes at the end of the visit. Writing a pledge had to feel personal but take no more than three minutes, the point where visitors lose interest.
- Uneven source data. The Memorial Wall draws on the Fort Pierce museum's existing database, so the layout had to handle mixed photo quality and bio lengths, and stay editable by museum staff.
- Within reach. Calls to action sit in the accessible reach zone, and Memorial Wall search results fill from the bottom of the screen.
Four interactives, four interaction models
The pieces share one visual language. Their structures differ, each shaped by what its content needs.
One template, eight missions
Eight screens, each telling a mission led by Navy SEALs. I designed one flow that works for all eight: a looping attract, a short intro film, a map with hotspots for geographic context, a scroll-driven story told in graphic-novel style, and an animated recap of the objective, execution, and takeaways. One template keeps the gallery consistent, so visitors who finish one mission already know how to read the next.
Explore the fallen, era by era
Two touchscreens honoring SEALs who died in combat or training. Visitors browse a canvas of portraits grouped by era, sort by last name, hometown, or year, or search by name. Portraits stay black and white on the canvas and return to their original color on the bio page. I supervised a junior designer's visitor flow, reworked it, annotated every screen, and wireframed the canvas and bio pages for the visual designers and developers.
Guided choices, quiet moderation
A pledge kiosk at the end of the visit. Visitors build a commitment by choosing a cause and an action, or write their own, then add their initials and where they're from. The pledge joins a scrolling wall of messages. Write-ins pass through a profanity filter and AI checks for intent and context. Anything that fails is left off the wall, so the kiosk runs without staff approving each message.
Two screens, one cockpit
A game where visitors pilot a SEAL Delivery Vehicle with a physical joystick across two screens: the view ahead on top, a touchscreen instrument panel below. Four stations sit beneath a real SDV. I oversaw NGX's design deliverables, reviewed their package at every milestone, and ran a quick test with college students to see how attention moves between the two screens.
Process
Visitor flows, sketches, storyboards, and testing set how each station behaves.
In May 2024, I ran one-on-one sessions at G&A's NYC lab: a usability test of the Memorial Wall and a concept test of one Featured Mission. The findings went straight into the next round of wireframes.
Outcome
Opened October 4, 2025, in downtown San Diego.
Featured Missions lines the second-floor gallery, the Memorial Wall anchors the first floor, and Cause Higher Than Oneself closes the visit. Press coverage highlighted the museum's hands-on experiences, including the SDV game.