# Tauck 100 ## Summary Tauck 100 is a digital timeline built to express 100 years of company history across kiosk, tablet, desktop, and mobile. The work focused on turning an initially kiosk-oriented concept into a cross-surface interaction system with stable motion, navigation, and timing behaviors. ## Metadata - Role: Product Designer (Interaction Systems) - Platform: Web - Scope: Cross-surface interaction system for a 100-year timeline - Timeline: Jun 2024 – Jan 2025 - Audience: Guests, partners, and employees - Status: Completed (not shipped) ## Key Concepts - The selected interaction model was a scroll-driven vertical timeline with optional horizontal detours. - The system had to extend beyond a tightly controlled kiosk environment. - Viewport differences affected interaction timing and needed to be normalized. - Motion had to be systematized to stay expressive without becoming inconsistent. - Detours required explicit separation from the main navigation model. - The final system was designed to scale across surfaces and ongoing content additions. ## Full Content ### Overview Tauck partnered with Shavrick & Partners to create a digital experience capturing 100 years of company history. The goal was open-ended: to translate the breadth of Tauck’s legacy into an exploratory system that guests, partners, and employees could navigate. ### Choosing the model Before I joined, multiple directions were explored to structure the experience. The selected direction, Storytellers, was a vertically scrolling timeline with optional horizontal detours. | Direction | Interaction Model | Why it works | Constraints | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Eras | Era-based exploration with distinct visual systems per period. | Rich, contextual storytelling that mimics physical travel ephemera in digital form. | Would require separate desktop and mobile builds and introduced heavy hidden content. | | Maps | Geography-first navigation organized by location and thematic pillars. | Strong geographic framing and clear thematic messaging. | Extremely time and budget intensive, with several milestones not mapping cleanly to location. | | Storytellers | A scroll-driven vertical timeline with optional horizontal detours for deeper exploration. | Intuitive linear flow, one responsive solution across screens, and a modular structure by design. | Lower content density per screen can increase screens/states needed to tell stories. | ### Operating under uncertainty The experience was initially designed for a kiosk environment, where interaction could be tightly controlled. This introduced a core uncertainty: how to design an interaction system without a fixed device, input model, or viewport. ### Approach I joined at the point where the initial high-fidelity kiosk concept had to extend beyond a single surface. My first step was a design audit: identifying inconsistencies, interaction dependencies, and structural gaps across early concepts. From there, I defined the interaction model, motion behavior, and structural rules needed to make the timeline scalable and buildable across surfaces. ### System challenges These were the core interaction and system challenges that shaped the final experience. #### Viewport: interaction timing as a dependency Motion in the timeline was scroll-driven, with section entry and exit triggering nearly every interaction. This created a dependency: section height directly controlled when and how interactions occurred. Across viewports, that dependency broke. The same moment would trigger too early, too late, or inconsistently depending on screen size, making behavior unreliable. Decision: I defined a viewport system that decoupled interaction timing from a single layout model, using calibrated section heights per device class to normalize behavior. Outcome: Interaction timing became predictable, ensuring motion and scroll behavior remained consistent regardless of screen size. #### Motion: systematizing a creative constraint Motion was a core part of the creative direction, with the timeline designed as a scroll-driven, highly animated experience. However, without a defined system, motion became a source of inconsistency. Animations triggered across headlines, artifacts, media, and transitions without shared rules, varying based on direction, entry point, and state. This created tension between expressive motion and predictable behavior, making the system difficult to reason about and scale. Decision: I established motion as a system, defining consistent rules for timing, directionality, and state persistence, ensuring predictable behavior while preserving the intent of the creative direction. Outcome: Motion became consistent and repeatable, reinforcing hierarchy and orientation without introducing variability as the system scaled. #### Detours: separating navigation models The timeline introduced two navigation models: a linear vertical scroll for the main narrative and horizontal detours for deeper exploration. Initially, both relied on similar gesture inputs, creating conflict. Entering and exiting detours lacked clear boundaries, and interactions that worked in isolation broke when combined, causing disorientation. The system didn't clearly distinguish between navigating the timeline and exploring within it. Decision: I redefined detours as isolated interaction spaces with explicit entry and exit states, separating their behavior from the main timeline. Decision: Each model was given distinct interaction rules: vertical scroll governed progression, while horizontal gestures were reserved for exploration within detours. Outcome: Navigation became predictable and legible, allowing uninterrupted progression through the timeline while detours supported deeper exploration without breaking orientation. ### Final state The final system supported four channels, kiosk, tablet, desktop, and mobile. Interaction behavior remained consistent across surfaces, with motion scaling predictably across hundreds of assets and the system structured to support ongoing content additions without variability. The experience was delivered to spec and well received by stakeholders. It was ultimately parked due to internal content decisions, not issues with the experience itself. The most significant constraint was not design, but scope. Introducing a multi-channel system late created complexity that compounded over time, reinforcing the importance of defining interaction models and platform assumptions early. ## Key Decisions - Selected the Storytellers direction: a vertically scrolling timeline with optional horizontal detours. - Built a viewport system that normalized interaction timing across device classes. - Defined motion as a system with shared rules for timing, directionality, and state persistence. - Separated the detour interaction model from the main timeline with explicit entry and exit states. - Reserved vertical scroll for progression and horizontal gestures for detour exploration. ## Outcome The final system supported kiosk, tablet, desktop, and mobile with consistent behavior across surfaces. It was delivered to spec and well received, but ultimately parked due to internal content decisions rather than experience issues.