Disney's MagicBands+
My Disney Experience Family Planning Hub for Magic Bands
The Ask
Design a way for families to collaboratively plan their next trip to Walt Disney World. Disney was developing RFID bands that park guest will use to digitize their experience. They will use the bands for all aspects of their visit.
Assumptions
- Multiple families travel to Disney world together
- Everyone in the family wants to partake in planning the trip
- Families will revisit the park in subsequent years but may consist of a different travel party
Internal Challenges
Communication within such a large corporation and many teams was the number one obstical.
- Many teams were working on subflows
- Each team has multiple PMs, Legal, business owners, each with their own terminology and requirements
** Provide Received F&F Invitations for 'Owned' Unregistered Guest (Take) **
As SF, I can provide all F&F Invitations received by a specified 'Owned' Guest, using Guest xID, SWID, or xBand ID, to the requesting system, in order to enable viewing of the Received Invitations, with the corresponding response status (Pending, Accepted, Declined, Removed), for the identified 'Owned' Guest to the 'Owning' Guest.. Invitations in a 'Revoked' status will not be returned.
The requirements didn't match up.
- Conflicting terminology
- Requirements were granular before we knew what we were building
- Legal and social complexities were applied inconsistently
Establish Communications
Before we could start coming up with solutions, we needed to improve understanding:
- What are we trying to build?
- Who are we building this for?
- How will it be used?
Characters
Before we start solving we need to improve understanding:
- Customers need quick access to their data
- Customers needed expertise and patience find their data.
- They had to load too many pages to get a complete overview.
- If they forgot to visit a page, they may have missed an issue that needed attention.
- Customers were not using certain features because they didn't know how.
- Even without using all the features, customers were overwhelmed by the number of fields each page presented.
- Many fields were had cryptic labels with no descriptions.
Visualize broad flows quickly
Many sketching and whiteboarding session were done on planes and boardrooms across the country as I met with the various line of business owners.
Detail flows to identifying questions
Small parts of flows were broken out into simple use cases. This made it easier to dive into the details. Roughly 30 unique flows were created. The ones with open questions were shared with the corresponding team members to close out open questions.
Visualize requirements
Many permissions matrices were needed to clarify functionality. Again characters were used to clarify which type of guest we were referring to.
Identify knowledge gaps
Research and Design Cycles
Define questions that users can help us answer
- Plan research session
- Create discussion guide and test script for prototype
- Quickly wireframed the flow to help guide the research session
- Add full fidelity
- Build Prototype to match test script
Synthesize findings
Reconnect with legal, product managers, and line of business owners to share findings and recommendations for moving forward
Requirements where adjusted, added, removed
With that, we had enough to work on our next round of design and testing
Project Outcomes
User Value
- Delivered a system they actually want to us
- Applications speaks in the user's language
- Family feels more at ease about what data Disney is gathering and why
Business Value
- Legal and business owners have confidence about what they are building, mitigating project risk
- They are only building what is needed, saving time and money
Tech Value
- Clear understanding on what needs to be built
- Solid foundation that can be evolved overtime
- Iterations fined tune interactions, copy and visual design
Product Launch
After 5+ years in development, Disney completed changes to:
- Ticketing turnstiles
- Hotel door locks
- Photopass
- Fastpass check in
- Snack and store point-of-sale terminals
The “My Disney Experience” app was launched in to the public in 2013 on iOS and Android phones, tablets and desktop.
The product is still in use today and has evolved to their 3rd iteration of the bands. The experience has been expanded to Disneyland and Disney Cruises. The foundations of my work can still be seen in it's current iteration.
To hear about the long term business value I provided, book a meeting with me.