Veterans Memorial Museum Platform
A not-for-profit tourism association with a charitable fundraising license runs a military museum and veterans' heritage initiative alongside a tourism ecosystem and a social-enterprise model supporting local small businesses. It manages several websites and digital assets at different stages of completion, and its structured killed-in-action soldiers database — a significant historical asset — powers a museum site that was partially broken when a database table was removed and hasn't been repaired for lack of funding. Delivering a new Veterans Memorial Museum platform concept built on that database.
Back to archive
Design a modern, searchable, map-enabled, story-driven museum platform that uses the soldiers database as its anchor — with clear pathways to book museum-related experiences — and connects to the organization's tourism ecosystem through cross-linking and shared discovery, not integration or merging.
Analyzing the organization's digital ecosystem as a platform — its tourism, museum, Indigenous tourism, travel, events, and small-business assets — with the museum and database as the pilot experience, and weighing risks around bloat, brittleness, ethics, privacy, and maintainability. Personas span veterans' families, visitors, teachers and students, small-business partners, and staff and volunteers, with journeys emphasizing soldier search, interactive mapping, profile viewing, and guided storytelling, plus a review of current AI and automation uses. Concept design, UX/UI prototyping, lightweight AI-governance recommendations, and a roadmap only; a full rebuild of all sites and complex backend work are excluded.
High-fidelity, web-first prototypes — with an iPhone app prototype if feasible — of searchable soldier profiles, interactive map exploration by origin, branch, conflict, or Indigenous nation, timelines, photos, and narratives, guided chatbot flows (“learn about the museum,” “find a soldier,” “see today's events”), and cross-links to events and tourism content. Presented as a path from a fragmented set of websites and automations toward a coherent, maintainable, ethically governed platform.