Blijdorp Zoo
UI/UX design
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2024
Data visualization, component library, developer handoff
The IUCN Red List is a seven-step scientific classification. The audience is someone standing up in a room full of specimen jars, with a child on one hand and half a minute of attention, who did not come to read anything.
Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam wanted a touchscreen for that visitor. I designed a guessing game: a species, what is known about its population, the pressures on it, and six statuses to choose between.
The reveal doesn’t just say right or wrong – it says why.
Two screens set it up before any guessing: what the six statuses mean, and how a population figure, its trend and four threats add up to one of them. After that the game stops explaining and starts asking.
In the exhibit – the touchscreen on its tilted stand, among the room’s own specimen jars, tusks and a taxidermy turtle.
Nothing is a trick: everything needed to guess is on the screen. I tinted the four threats – habitat loss, climate change, pollution, overhunting – grey, yellow, orange or red per species, so the same threat can be a footnote for one animal and a red flag for the next without a paragraph explaining the difference. Grey means it barely applies. Red means it is one of the reasons the animal is on the list at all.
Game screen – a species photo, the population in the wild, four threats tinted by severity, and the six statuses to choose from.
Population is not always a number. Some species have a range, some have a trend arrow and little else, some are simply unknown – which is what the source data says, so it is what the screen says. Five rounds, five guesses, dots along the bottom ticking off.
Then all five line up against the real classification, and each carries a button that opens the reasoning behind it. The reveal doesn’t just say right or wrong – it says why: a sturgeon no longer hunted but still cut off from the water it breeds in, a laughingthrush caught for its song.
Results – five species side by side, the visitor’s guess next to the real status, and a button on each that opens the reasoning.
A visitor who plays it once probably won’t remember which status the puffin holds. What they leave with is that endangerment is a scale rather than a yes or no, and that where a species sits on it has reasons behind it.