Service Design · Public Infrastructure · FinTech UX

Nairobi National Museum: Restoring Access to Public Heritage

A national museum should feel welcoming — not like a government checkpoint. When Kenya moved all public payments to a mandatory online portal, buying a museum ticket suddenly meant creating a full tax account, filling out 12 fields and hoping your foreign bank card wouldn't get blocked. Entry queues stretched to 15 minutes. I redesigned the whole intake into a simple guest flow — 3 taps, no account, 45 seconds to get through the gate.

Role

Lead Product & Service Designer

End-to-end: Research → Design → Build

Timeline

Jun – Aug 2026

~10 weeks · Solo project

What Actually Happens at the Gate

When cashless policy clashed with historical stone walls and international payment gateways.

In late 2023, Kenya required all public institutions to route payments exclusively through the eCitizen portal, strictly prohibiting cash at ticket counters. While intended for revenue transparency, applying a national tax authentication system to casual museum entry created three structural failure modes:

Account walls for walk-ins: Visitors stood in the midday sun filling out 12 registration fields, password rules and email validations just to buy an admission ticket.
SMS OTP dead-ends: The domestic payment gateway triggered 3D-Secure SMS OTP verifications that overseas visitors could not receive without active roaming.
The lobby Faraday cage: The museum's 1929 stone architecture blocked mobile signal, preventing visitors from loading the government portal once inside the lobby.

"They completely refuse cash and the mandatory government payment website kept declining our foreign cards with SMS codes we couldn't receive on roaming. We had to get help from a local guide just to pay."

TripAdvisor VerifiedForeign Card Blocker

"The queue at the ticket desk was stalled because families were stuck on their phones trying to register and pay online. Front-desk staff were helpless because cash was legally banned."

TripAdvisor VerifiedGroup Bottleneck

02 / Service Blueprint

10 Steps Reduced to 3 Taps

Decoupling civic tax collection from cultural leisure. The service journey was re-architected to accommodate three critical real-world constraints:

01. International Tourists (eSIMs)Zero national ID required. Camera OCR card scanner eliminates manual 16-digit typing.

02. Short-Stay VisitorsNo account walls. Total gate intake completed in under 45 seconds.

03. Local Families1-tap M-Pesa STK push for the entire group without typing individual names.

Design Decisions03 / Interface Flow

Five Screens That Removed the Bottleneck

Every screen was engineered around one principle: get visitors through the turnstile without demanding unnecessary data.

Primary DecisionGuest Flow

12 Fields Compressed into Just 2

Eliminated mandatory passwords, security questions and government account registration. Casual visitors just enter a name and email to receive offline turnstile passes.