OVERVIEW
The intent of this project was to build a currency converter for 6 Latin American countries with 6 different currencies.
ROLE Interaction Designer
TEAM MEMBERS Deborah Allison (Lead Interaction Designer) Eve Songdej (Visual Designer)
SIGNIFICANCE – This project was an excellent exercise in working cross-functionally with other disciplines and learning when to champion design and how to push back on business requirements.
DELIVERABLES Competitive Analysis Heuristic Evaluations Secondary Research Wireframes Executive Presentations
Original Proposal from Product
Product originally asked the Design team to design a modal for price conversions. The link to the modal would be strategically placed at key points in the sales flow
ISSUES WITH THIS APPROACH
The modal obscures the pricing information from view, requiring guests to click out and click back into the modal when needing to compare more than one price.
Because it doesn’t store calculations, the cognitive burden would be placed on the guest to retain the converted prices when trying to compare.
To explore the problem space, we did a competitive analysis. We gathered secondary research.
Most sites that we audited had a global toggle (usually paired next to a language toggle) that converted all of the prices on the site. We then considered the implications of this for Walt Disney World's site.
100 USD is the smallest price unit on the Disney World site. Translated into the 6 currencies needed for the project, the Colombian Peso needed the most consideration for a scalable solution. Any design approach needed to scale to include a minimum of 8 digits. We wanted to toggle the prices of the site, but some of the pages on the platform aren't built to scale beyond USD prices, and the design would break to accommodate such an update.
Example of Scaling Issue:
Because globally toggling price translations is an industry standard, and Guest expectation, we continued to do explorations to make tougher pages scalable. The issue with the tickets page is the number of items displayed in a view, so we tried formatting prices with a lesser number of days in one view.
Design leadership didn't approve a global toggle or conjoined toggle with geolocation because the design iterations broke established platform patterns and would increase project scope.
These new constraints allowed us to focus our efforts on targeting key prices within the sales flow, such as subtotals and price summaries, and converting those prices automatically for the guest using geolocation.
We also placed a link to a price conversion modal on pages where we couldn't target specific prices (either due to design constraints or legal constraints).
Outcome
Design leadership liked and approved the new design approach. We took our learnings from this project and shared it with the larger team:
Consider international audiences on every project not just international projects. Disney is an international brand that uses platform design. One design change on one site impacts other sites down the line.
Leverage in-house design researchers
Make sure project requirements are vetted by stakeholders