Making the Complex Explorable: Rethinking NASA Home & City

Home & City translates NASA’s technology portfolio into the places where people live their lives: bathrooms, kitchens, grocery stores. We helped them develop the platform six years ago, and since then, it’s remained one of their most trafficked sites. But it was originally intended for exploration, and as their universe of information grew, exploring it got harder. So, NASA brought us back—not to add more ways to navigate, but to make Home & City feel even more discoverable.

Before anything else, we looked at how people were using the platform. Educators and students were the core audience, arriving through tools like Google Classroom and Schoology. Engagement clustered around the familiar: Bathroom, Bedroom, and Kitchen led the way in Home, and Grocery, Sports, and Medical did the same in City. People connected most strongly with the spaces that mirrored their own lives—and that insight shaped where we invested in the redesign.

EXPLORE

Room-by-room exploration is core to what makes Home & City memorable, and preserving that delight was non-negotiable. But it can work against findability—the qualities that make an experience feel rich are often the same ones that make specific information hard to locate. So the immersive, wander-through-a-kitchen experience stays front and center, exactly as engaging as it’s always been. We just made sure it wasn’t the only way in.

DISCOVER

Another important consideration was making sure the platform—meant to hold literally decades of NASA innovation—was designed for the long haul. This meant thinking into the future and establishing templates (like sector pages, spinoff pages, flexible content modules) that will let NASA’s team keep expanding Home & City as their technology portfolio grows, without requiring another ground-up overhaul six years from now.

This new iteration of Home & City is easier to navigate and search, and it’s built to keep evolving for the classrooms that already depend on it—and everyone else who’s ever wondered what NASA has to do with their coffee maker. This is also a good example of how the strongest digital work rarely comes from one discipline alone. The project moved from strategy and data, to content and UX, to design and technology, in service of making something complex feel simple to explore.