Situation
Disney Parks was embarking on a digital transformation of the shopping, planning, booking and in-park experiences for WDW guests.
High cost of support
Complicated transaction
Low satisfaction of missing planning/booking windows
The initiative had clear objectives and sound rationale, backed by data. But operating this scale of change affected so many business units and longstanding models, it was difficult to navigate important design decisions.
Task
I drove the design of a team, a process and an engagement to work across an entire guest journey, offering a glimpse at potential new interfaces, content and services - representing a vision of the future.
This presentation was used to connect with various business units, teams and communicate the vision across the organization, as requirements for design, build and development were still be worked out.
This was a massive transformation - as an example, this project moved beyond mailing out vacation planning DVDs to architecting an expertly guided personal vacation planning experience as a digital product.
Action
My role was to work with the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online (WDPRO) team leadership to build a story and presentation that captured the essence of the future parks vision as it evolved.
I also led UX ideation, vignette/journey development and information architecture approaches early in concepting. I organized our team's process and deliverables. I wrote the strategy for the new experience, drafting from Disney's performance data and insights.
We evolved the vision from story to wireframes and sketches, to high-fidelity UX/UI, constantly evolving the story as we presented to various teams and groups - and evolving key elements of the vision, including UX, UI and content.
We built user journeys based on traffic and e-commerce data, built a few persona families based on Disney Insights data, and then imagined how new Content, Commerce and Personalization could help them shop for, plan, book and enjoy a Disney vacation.
We collaborated with Disney UX teams, Frog Design and Accenture to assemble live-looking playable prototypes to enable leaders to show the vision.
We produced a full video with voiceover to help people who weren’t in meetings to access the thinking as well. We animated the journey in Keynote. Ha!
We built scenarios based on the most difficult and costly aspects of planning and booking.
Sometimes we walked through the parks and resorts to seek on-the-ground wisdom and hard-to-find answers - and built them into the solution stories.
As we developed concepts, individual business leaders would offer insights on implementation, priorities and operational realities.
Results
By leading very early with transformative design, we were able to engage a sprawling organization using the form of a guest story. Business-unit-specific concerns and priorities were collapsed into shared priorities as we re-envisioned the entire experience - a vision that raised all ships, as it were.
What's more, we were given 2nd and 3rd chances to improve our design solutions across the journey - as much of the visioning hadn't been vetted, tested - ink was fresh.
We were tapped to create a process with Disney Research to test concepts before they were sent to production.
Our team were asked to develop a product idea investment process based on our Foundational Sprints - including criteria for further development.
We also developed the product/ux org chart, job descriptions and workstream models for collaboration between tech, creative, product and business leaders.
