Research · Morikami Japanese Gardens
What I found on morikami.org
A review of the live site, as a visitor planning a trip · First pass 2 August 2026, rechecked 24 September 2026
Before designing a ticket flow for Morikami, I went through its website the way someone planning a visit would and wrote down everything that got in the way. The first pass logged 66 findings. These are the ones that shaped the case study, each checked again on 24 September.
You can’t buy a ticket
“Admission tickets are only available at the door on the day of your visit.” That line on the Hours & Admission page is the whole booking story: find the price, drive there, pay at the desk.
The header has one button, and it says Donate. There’s no Buy tickets or Plan your visit beside it. The homepage does link to a “Plan your visit” page, but the page doesn’t exist; the link ends at “page not found”.
The access information is good, and hard to find
Hours & Admission covers push-button entry, the length of the garden path, benches, accessible parking, ramp access and service animals. That’s more than most museum sites manage.
It sits more than halfway down that page, under hours and prices, and the FAQ adds that wheelchairs aren’t provided. Someone who needs it has to know where to look.
The homepage doesn’t say what it is
- There’s no main heading, and no description for search engines. The browser tab shows the mission statement.
- 13 of the 21 images on the homepage have no text description, so a screen reader skips them or reads out a file name.
- It loads over a hundred separate script files.
One thing from August is already better: the mobile menu didn’t open in my first pass, and it does now.
What it changed in the design
- No way to buy online became the ticket flow itself, with arrival windows that say what’s usually true instead of inventing scarcity.
- Access details buried under prices became Accessibility as its own step, and a separate accessible mode one tap from the first screen.
- A homepage that doesn’t say what it is became a first screen that leads with the name, today’s hours and Buy tickets.
Morikami didn’t ask for this review. It describes the public website on the dates above.