Case Study | Seattle Aquarium
How Zazz Delivered Interactive Learning Through Digital Innovation
A multi-platform ecosystem unifying kiosks, ticketing, and mobile engagement to elevate conservation outreach.
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Seattle Aquarium partnered with ZAZZ to reinvent the visitor journey through a single, cloud-native platform that drives interactive learning, streamlines operations, and extends educational impact well beyond the waterfront campus. The result is a tightly integrated stack—touchscreen exhibits, mobile web, robust ticketing, and a headless CMS—delivered with enterprise-grade security, uptime, and accessibility.
The Engineering Impact
Driving engagement, revenue, and reliability with scale, uptime, and usability.
The Challenge
Pain Point
- Fragmented exhibit tech made updates slow and costly.
- Siloed ticketing & membership tools.
- Accessibility mandates (WCAG 2.1 AA).
- Real-time analytics & uptime.
Business Risk
- Inconsistent visitor experience and limited content agility.
- Lost revenue from abandoned purchases and manual reconciliation.
- Compliance exposure for a publicly funded nonprofit.
- Peak-season traffic spikes risked downtime during marquee events.
Technical Gap
- No central API layer; device-specific codebases
- Legacy POS lacked modern APIs and mobile support.
- UI/UX and content workflows not designed for inclusive access.
- No autoscaling, limited observability, manual deployments.
The Objective
Design and deploy a single digital backbone that:
- Unifies visitor touchpoints — kiosks, ticketing, mobile, and web — under a common API and content layer.
- Unifies visitor touchpoints — kiosks, ticketing, mobile, and web — under a common API and content layer.
- Drives revenue and throughput with friction-less ticket purchase, QR admission, and data-driven upsell logic.
- Meets public-trust mandates for WCAG 2.1 accessibility, data privacy, and 24/7 operational resilience.
- Delivers curator autonomy via a headless CMS that publishes exhibit content to every screen in seconds.
The Solution
- Immersive Exhibit Network: 40+ Raspberry Pi–powered kiosks running a React/TypeScript front-end. Dynamic content playlists pulled from a GraphQL API, refreshed in <5 sec. Offline cache + checksum sync to survive network drops.
- Unified Ticketing & Mobile Passes Headless commerce engine (Stripe + custom middleware) with QR issuance. Responsive PWA for way-finding, program alerts, and push notifications.
- Headless CMS & Content Governance: Role-based workflows for curators, educators, and marketing. Markdown/WYSIWYG, versioning, and scheduled publish windows. Instant propagation to kiosks, web, and mobile via WebSocket fan-out.
- Cloud & DevSecOps Kubernetes on AWS us-west-2 with node groups sized by exhibit foot-traffic forecasts. Terraform + GitHub Actions for IaC, blue-green deploys, and SCA scans. Zero-trust IAM (OIDC, short-lived tokens) and encrypted secrets via AWS KMS.
- Accessibility & Compliance WCAG 2.1 AA validated flows, high-contrast themes, screen-reader landmarks. Quarterly VAPT, PII minimization, and GDPR-ready consent management for EU visitors
The Impact
- 3× increase in interactive dwell-time at key exhibits within the first quarter.
- 32 % uplift in online ticket conversions after mobile launch, cutting queue wait-times by 21 %.
- 99.97 % platform uptime across summer peak, with autoscaling handling a 4× traffic surge flawlessly.
- Full content autonomy—curators publish multilingual updates in minutes, not weeks.
- Future-proof foundation ready for next-gen features: AR overlays, donor micro-campaigns, and IoT water-quality sensors.
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