ROLE Lead Product Designer
SIGNIFICANCE – This is one of the few projects in our organization where we worked directly with Imagineering and Yellow Shoes Marketing. I was accountable for both the visual and interaction design and aligning business needs not only within my segment (Parks & Resorts Online) but also within those 2 business segments.
DELIVERABLES Competitive Analysis Heuristic Evaluations Secondary Research Wireframes Comps/Spec Redlines Executive Presentations Accessibility Documentation
The Challenge
The Walt Disney company needed to authentically market and educate prospective Guests on a new immersive lodging experience for Walt Disney World resort. This would require 3 separate business units to work together through ambiguity as there was an embargo on the media and content even at an internal level.
Insight
Prospective Guests really didn’t know what the Galactic Starcruiser was. Speculation ranged from it being a new cruise ship, a new ride, a new land, and a new hotel. And those that guessed correctly that it was a hotel didn’t know what the experience included and what to expect for such a high price.
Solution
As the sole designer, I needed to balance the business partner’s desire to remain in-story and theme, deliver high class design that can simultaneously live within the patterns of the Disney World website but still feel like “Star Wars”, and educate the Guests without breaking the story.
As a quick and cheap win, product desired reuse of this campaign template to support the storytelling and marketing of the new experience:
Issues with using this layout:
It doesn’t support copy. All the copy in this template is overlaid on an image, presenting accessibility issues
The visual design feels very “Disney”. LucasFilms and Imagineering wanted a distinctive look to the site to stay in theme and story with the Star Wars franchise
Because this was a direct ask from partners, I had to consider it in my design. I created various high fidelity mockups to address the issues and use the template.
I tried to differentiate the header image from the rest of the site by using the Disney Cruise line “swoop” pattern for header imagery.
I also explored locking up the images with color blocks so that the template could support copy – though this pattern had it’s issues with not being scalable. We needed to build for scalability because we didn’t have all the content from partners.
After completing these hi-fi wireframes, I decided to take a pivot and create a site design inspired by the marketing for the Galactic Star Cruiser and the movies themselves.
For this iteration of the design, I created flexible modules so that the content could scale, as I was designing with ambiguity and didn’t have set imagery or copy length. I used the lack of media as an opportunity to pitch blue-sky digital product strategy to the Imagineers and marketing. Some of these proposals included a faux “in-flight” video similar to the airline videos of commercial airlines to generate excitement and explain expectations for the experience (while remaining in-story!). I also included influencer testimonials as a way to generate social engagement and provide organic sneak-peeks into the experience.
Solution
The final solution for this design fit the design system for our Walt Disney World website, but retained the visual language of the Star Wars Franchise. The final design featured a booking calendar and removed some of the conceptual storytelling above such as the Flight Takeoff video, the Influencer testimony, and the What to Pack module. Business partners felt that these could not be supported at the time of launch.