A garden ticket anyone can book

The museum meets its visitors at the desk

Morikami is a Japanese garden and museum in Delray Beach, Florida: six gardens around a pond, two galleries, a bonsai collection.

Its website sells event tickets, memberships and gift-shop items, and takes donations. It doesn’t sell admission. In its own words, admission is “only available at the door.”

So the museum meets every visitor at the desk, and every surprise happens there too. It can’t plan for numbers, have a wheelchair ready, or stop a busy day from overfilling.

What visitors and other gardens told me

I had no access to Morikami’s visitors or staff, so I used what’s public, three ways:

• The website. I went through it the way a visitor would and wrote down what got in the way: no online admission, a “Plan your visit” link to a missing page, a header whose only button is Donate. What I found on morikami.org
• 153 unhappy reviews. I read every Tripadvisor review that gave three stars or fewer. That’s where people explain what went wrong.
• Four other gardens. The ones reviewers compare Morikami to: the Portland and San Francisco Japanese gardens, Fairchild, and Flamingo Gardens. I went through each booking flow the way a visitor would.

Most bad reviews are about price or upkeep, which booking can’t fix. Three visitors kept coming up that it can:

The other gardens all sell admission online. None of them asks about access needs while you book.

Most of these reviews were written before 2020, and I read only the unhappy ones, on purpose. The gardens were checked on 4 October 2026.

The deeper I went, the more problems I discovered

My first version, in mid-August, was a plain online checkout. The date screen said: “No timed entry. Arrive any time before 4:00pm.”

Then I asked what that checkout actually did for the museum. A ticket sold online still doesn’t tell anyone how many people will be on the paths at noon. And if the garden gets as crowded as the busiest streets of Tokyo, it isn’t a garden-and-museum experience anymore.

The reviews say the same. Five of them, mostly about Morikami’s festivals, say outright that it sold too many tickets.

So at the end of August the design changed direction. Booking would be about arrival: the museum sees a busy day coming, and stops it before it overfills.

Access needs were in my head the whole time, even before the design was ready for them. Crowds and access needs shaped the booking flow together.

Arrival windows

Other gardens sell 30- or 60-minute entry slots. Portland offers sixteen a day. That’s crowd control by the minute, and Morikami doesn’t need it. It’s quieter, and reviewers often mention driving an hour or more to get there. After a drive that long, a 30-minute slot is easy to miss.

I split the day into three two-hour windows: 10 to 12, 12 to 2, 2 to 4. The window is only about arriving. Once you’re in, you stay until close, and every screen says so.

If you’re late, the front desk finds you the next window.

• Three windowsfor arriving only.
• What’s usually trueinstead of a count of spots left.
• The all-day promisesaid where the choice is made.

The countdown I cut

The first version of the picker showed “24 spots left” and “8 spots left”. I took them out. The museum isn’t busy enough for those numbers to be true, and invented scarcity is pressure to buy.

Accessibility, as the centerpiece

I want someone with access needs to get the same visit as everyone else, and to feel great about it.

The real Morikami is wheelchair accessible, but it doesn’t lend wheelchairs. Because this is a concept, I designed what a garden could plausibly offer, and wrote it the way someone with a need would want to read it.

Inside the normal flow

Access needs get a step of their own, between tickets and review, called “Accessibility”. My first label was “Getting around”, which sounded friendlier but isn’t the word anyone scans for.

The step asks plainly: a wheelchair, and how many; a service animal; someone coming to help, who enters free; something else, in your own words, and “a person reads every one.” I wrote that up in Plain labels, warm sentences.

Three rules: real quantities, no proof asked, and nothing on this screen changes your total. The wheelchair then follows the booking: “No charge” on the review, a note on the confirmation to ask for the step-free route.

A second way through

Accessible mode is one tap from the first screen. It’s a separate flow of eight plain steps, one question each: “When are you coming?” “How many people?” “Anything we should know?” “Check this is right.”

It’s built differently: 30px headings, 2px borders, options and buttons 56 to 81 pixels tall, “Step 4 of 8” at the top, and a color mode that fixes the two values the standard palette fails. It keeps what you’ve already picked, so switching modes doesn’t start you over.

And it takes the pressure off: no time limit; reserve now, pay at the desk; a code short enough to read out; and a phone number where it matters, with a person behind it.

What I checked

I ran an automated accessibility check (axe, WCAG 2.2 AA) on all 23 screens of the prototype.

Automated issues

None, on all 23 screens.

Smallest control

44 by 44 pixels.

Form fields

18 of 18 have labels.

Hidden screens

Can’t be reached by keyboard.

Automated checks only catch part of the problem. The test that matters, someone booking with a screen reader, is the first thing I’d run next.

What the reviews changed

The date step already knew two things: Mondays are closed, and the last Saturday of the month sells out.

The reviews showed a third. Twenty-one people paid, walked in, and only then found the villa or the galleries shut. One family drove two hours and was turned away at the gate for a private event.

So the day you pick now says what’s closed, what’s open, and when it reopens. The review says it again before you pay, and the confirmation says it a third time. A private event closes the whole day, like a Monday, with the reason under the calendar. In accessible mode, the day list says it in plain words: “Open, but the Yamato-kan villa is closed.”

San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden does a simpler version: a renovation note next to its ticket button. Here it sits on the day itself, where you make the choice.

To reach the states that are hard to hit by chance (a closed villa, a declined card, a timed-out session, accessible mode), use the Screens button in the corner, or press ?.

What I tested, and what it didn’t tell me

In August I sent the prototype to friends and family with one task: try to buy a ticket. Everyone got through, and everyone liked it.

But it was a friendly room, and nobody reporting a single problem is a warning sign in itself. Nobody was asked to act as a member, the one path where a person can lose real money. And the build they saw had no arrival windows and no accessible mode yet.

What I’d test next:

• Can someone using a screen reader book, start to finish, in accessible mode, on their own?
• Can a member get the whole family in free without paying by mistake?
• Do the windows spread arrivals out, or does everyone still come at noon?

And if it went live, what I’d measure: how many visitors book ahead, how arrivals spread across the windows, how many access requests are ready before the visitor walks in, and whether reviews about closures after paying stop.

What I’d do differently

• Talk to the front desk first. They see this problem every day, and I never asked them.
• Test the risky paths. My one test came before accessible mode existed, with a task that skipped members.
• Keep one source of truth. Figma, the design notes and the prototype drifted apart. The notes said “no timed entry” weeks after the switch.

Still open:

• Two colors fail contrast in the standard palette: the input borders and the dot that marks an event day. Accessible mode fixes both; the standard mode should too.
• Type is set in pixels, so it scales with zoom but not with a visitor’s default text size.
• Member sign-in, promo codes and wallet payments are only entry points.

A self-initiated concept, not affiliated with Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. Photos in the prototype are the museum’s own. Designed in Figma; prototype built with Claude Code.