2 Exhibits at Empire State Building 80th-Floor Observatory
UI/UX and motion design for three interactive experiences at the Empire State Building's 80th-floor observatory — redesigning kiosk interfaces, a borough media wall, and a multilingual host connection system for one of the world's most visited public destinations.
Empire State Building 80th-Floor Observatory. Photo: Evan Joseph / Empire State Realty Trust.
The Empire State Building's 80th-floor observatory is one of the most visited public spaces in the world. Its digital exhibits serve visitors from every country, across a wide range of ages, abilities, and languages — and they do so in a high-noise, high-footfall environment where attention is divided and dwell time is unpredictable.
At Squint/Opera, I worked on the UI/UX design and motion graphics for three distinct interactive elements on the floor: a set of six itinerary kiosks produced in partnership with NYC & Company, a five-borough media wall, and a multilingual host connection system featuring eight building guides sharing personal stories in nine languages.
Each exhibit required a different design response — but all three shared the same underlying constraint: interfaces that needed to work for everyone, legibly, in under thirty seconds of engagement.
Three Exhibits
NYC: Above and Beyond
Six interactive kiosks letting visitors build customized itineraries across all five boroughs — redesigned for accessibility, legibility, and clearer navigation.
Heart of NYC Media Wall
A media wall featuring borough-specific destination highlights, with motion graphics supporting the narrative introduction of each.
Host Connection Attractor
Five kiosks featuring eight building guides sharing personal stories in nine languages — redesigned for a noisy environment where audio alone was not enough.
Exhibit I — NYC: Above and Beyond
The NYC: Above and Beyond kiosks are a partnership with NYC & Company, New York's official tourism board. Visitors use the touchscreen video blades to build a customized itinerary across all five boroughs — selecting neighborhoods, attractions, and experiences to take away from the observatory floor.
The existing interface had accumulated three significant problems: height accessibility that excluded shorter visitors and children, page layouts that confused navigation between sections, and missing information at key interaction points. The redesign addressed all three, with an additional ADA mode giving visitors with disabilities a dedicated interaction pathway.
Redesigned kiosk UI — borough selection and itinerary builder screens.
Problem 1 — Accessibility & Legibility
The original layout placed key interactive elements at heights inaccessible to shorter visitors and children. The redesign redistributed the interaction zones and increased typographic spacing — ensuring the interface was legible and reachable across the full range of visitor heights, and meeting ADA requirements for touchscreen accessibility.
Accessibility and legibility improvements — interaction zone redistribution and typographic spacing for a wide visitor range.
Problem 2 — Navigation & UI Transitions
The original page layout created confusion at transition points — visitors could not easily tell which section they were in or how to move between them. The redesign simplified the page structure, clarified the navigation hierarchy, and designed intentional UI transitions that communicated state changes clearly without interrupting the itinerary-building flow.
Navigation and transition redesign — clarifying page structure and state changes across the itinerary builder flow.
Problem 3 — Missing Information & Interactions
Key interaction points lacked the contextual information visitors needed to make decisions — leaving them stranded mid-flow without adequate guidance. The redesign filled these information gaps and added the missing interaction affordances, ensuring visitors could complete the itinerary builder without dead ends or ambiguous states.
Filling information gaps — adding contextual guidance and missing interaction affordances at decision points in the itinerary flow.
Exhibit II — Heart of NYC Media Wall
The Heart of NYC Media Wall features curated destination highlights from all five New York City boroughs — clips provided by NYC & Company that showcase the character and draw of each area. My role was video editing and motion graphics: selecting and cutting the provided footage, then designing the animated graphic layer that introduced each borough and its content.
The motion graphics needed to work as a continuous ambient loop — readable at a glance for visitors passing through, and rewarding for those who stopped to watch. The graphic layer supported the narrative without competing with the footage itself.
Heart of NYC Media Wall — installed in the 80th-floor observatory. Photo: Evan Joseph / Empire State Realty Trust.
Exhibit III — Host Connection Attractor
Five kiosks on the observatory floor feature eight hosts — building guides who share personal stories about New York City in nine languages. The concept is strong: personal, multilingual, human-scale connection in one of the world's most impersonal tourist environments.
The original design relied on audio as the primary medium for the host stories. On a loud observatory floor, this created a fundamental problem: visitors couldn't hear the stories clearly, and there was no visual signal that something worth stopping for was happening. The result was low engagement — visitors walked past kiosks that were actively running stories they couldn't perceive.
Two solutions were developed: enhancing the visual attractor animation to create a more compelling stopping cue, and adding contextual visual material alongside the audio narratives so stories could be understood even in a noisy environment.
Host Connection Attractor — redesigned visual attractor and contextual story layer across five kiosks, eight hosts, nine languages.
Outcome
All three exhibits were delivered within a six-week production window and installed as part of the 80th-floor observatory experience. The kiosk redesign addressed the three identified accessibility and navigation problems and introduced an ADA mode, giving all visitors a functional interaction pathway regardless of ability or height.
The Host Connection redesign demonstrated a broader principle: that audio-first experiences in public environments require a visual anchor. In a space as acoustically challenging as a busy observatory floor, the visual layer is not supplementary — it is the experience.
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