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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.

5 min read

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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.

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Visitor-interaction time at digital exhibits after launch of the integrated kiosk + mobile platform.
0 X
Increase in ticketing revenue driven by friction-less mobile purchase and real-time upsell prompts.
0 %
Uptime sustained across kiosks, CMS, and ticketing APls through automated DevOps and active monitoring.
0 %
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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.
"Zazz helped us unify kiosks, ticketing, and mobile into a seamless platform—boosting engagement and transforming our conservation outreac”


Director - IT
Seattle Aquarium
  • 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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