The Challenge

Disney’s ticketing attribution system (TATER) was essentially a massive Excel dump, hundreds of columns wide, that was automated to run at 2AM every day. It then had to be manually updated before it was uploaded to another process at 4PM. “We are one corrupted spreadsheet from disaster” said our Product Owner from Ticketing.

Aside from the technical challenges of automating the current process and building in redundancies so that the system wouldn’t blow up if data was corrupted, our PO from the business had an unusual request: make it fun. “These accountants live in spreadsheets all day, and their jobs are more stressful than you would think. Anything you can do to brighten their day would help.”

Client

Disney & Pixar

Responsibilities

Discovery, Visual Design, UX Design, Front-End Development

Execution

I had just finished a larger project with Pixar, so I reached out to my contacts there and pitched the idea of using Andy’s room as the theme, with the Etch-A-Sketch as the monitor. It would require several rounds of approvals because of the toy’s IP not being owned by Disney, but they were enthusiastic about the idea. Our devs hadn’t written much XAML at that point, so that work fell to me as well.

“Leon has helped us greatly in reducing development time by leading discovery, designing & vetting out the wireframes, building the UI components for us and using the technologies we wanted to leverage. We were really thankful he took on the XAML work that was needed to build the UI.”

Brian ClarkProject Lead