Case study — Hormel Foods
The SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota is free to enter, open nearly every day of the year, and built almost entirely around things visitors touch. We built the software inside two of them — and they have to work every single time, without anyone on staff stepping in.
The venue
Sources: Arts Midwest; Hormel Foods newsroom. Museum has occupied its downtown Austin location since 2016. Admission is free.
The brief
Free admission changes the engineering problem. There's no turnstile smoothing arrivals into a steady trickle — a coach party can put forty people in front of a kiosk in ninety seconds, then leave it untouched for an hour. Visitors range from toddlers to pensioners, and a meaningful share have travelled a long way specifically to be there.
Hormel needed two interactive stations built into exhibit millwork that was already designed and being fabricated. The screens, mounting angles, and cutouts were fixed before we wrote a line of code. And because the museum runs with a small floor team of SPAMbassadors whose job is talking to visitors, the exhibits could not become something staff had to nurse through the day.
The variety quiz. A branching questionnaire that steers each visitor toward one of the SPAM product varieties. Every answer narrows the path, so two people taking it side by side get different questions and land somewhere different. The result screen is designed to be photographed — which turns a quiz into something visitors share after they leave.
The food innovation station. A countertop build-your-own kiosk where visitors assemble a product concept from ingredients, formats, and flavour directions, then see it presented as a finished thing. It rewards experimenting rather than answering correctly, which suits a station families crowd around together.
Implementation
Most exhibit software doesn't fail because the interaction design was wrong. It fails because nobody planned for the eight hundredth visitor of the day, the toddler who taps twelve things at once, or the moment the building loses its network. Those get designed for at the start or they get discovered in public.
Fixed millwork meant the interface had to be designed to the case, not the other way round. Screen size, mounting height, and viewing angle were already committed, which set the reach range and therefore where interactive elements could live. On the portrait kiosk that pushed all primary controls into the lower two-thirds of the screen — reachable by a child, still comfortable for an adult, and clear of the glare line from the gallery lighting above.
Outcome
Both kiosks have been in daily public operation since install, in a gallery that sees over a hundred thousand visitors a year. The variety quiz is described by visitors writing about the museum as one of the first things they encountered — a decade on from deployment, it's still the exhibit people mention by name.
The measure we care about isn't uptime on a dashboard. It's that in ten years of operation, the museum's floor staff have never needed to learn how to restart it.
Working on something similar?
For museums directly, and as the software partner for exhibit design and fabrication firms.