Disney’s Watercraft Ops team (the transportation vessels, from 400+ person ferries to 20-person pontoon boats) wanted to optimize their pilot resource utilization. The old method was to have a pilot drive a route between the same stops their entire shift, writing down their passenger counts at each stop with pen and paper. In order to better manage their resources and adjust for guest traffic on the fly, they needed an app to report that data back to the Ops Center.
The persona wasn’t your typical mobile user: male, 65+, potentially using a mobile device for the first time. At least half wore corrective lenses, and they all wore sunglasses (so polarization was an issue with the screen orientation). They would be using the device, mounted, while they were driving and potentially using it with gloves during the winter months.
We also found that they all didn’t count the same way: some put a range, some estimated based on the number of rows filled, and others used a clicker to get an exact count.
Lastly, we didn’t have cell reception over most of the waterways – we had to figure out how to seamlessly handle not having a connection to the cloud to minimize user impact.
Client
Walt Disney World Operations
Responsibilities
Customer Insights & Discovery, UX Design, Front-End Development, Usability Testing
Making It Easy & Accurate
Most frameworks at the time (~2013) assumed you always had a data connection, so we had to come up with our own solution. It was critical that it handled the data starts/stops behind the scenes so that it didn’t get in the way of the user, especially given our persona.
In retrospect, our solution seems both simple and obvious: install Wi-Fi at all of the Watercraft destinations, then have the apps attempt to upload based on a GPS fence.
The other big challenge was the controls. We found that the standard controls and text sizes simply didn’t work for our pilots, especially while moving on the water. After several rounds of testing, we landed on a size that was easy for them to see and use.
Once we had the sizing right, we also began working on input options for them, so they could enter an exact amount, enter a range, or use a slider to eyeball the count. We found that regardless of the counting method they preferred, they all had to deal with last-minute guests jumping on just before the boat left the docks, so they all received an incremental option to adjust the counts.
The Golden Age of Sailing
Visual Design
This was in the heyday of skeuomorphism, so we started with a mood board that evolved into several style tiles to determine the direction of the design. Once Operations selected a tile, I began implementing the design against the wireframes.
Implementation
Bootstrap was our standard component library at the time, making the implementation of over-sized controls a significant challenge. The app itself was a SPA written in MVC and hosted on Azure. I wrote the static HTML/CSS as a prototype to test with, then assisted our devs with implementing those files against their solution.
Reception
Watercraft Operations was ecstatic to go from having no data in their war room to having live updates of transport locations, capacity and usage. This allowed them to route vessels in real time to address demand and improve guest satisfaction. Over the next 6 months, the app was reskinned and updated to work for other lines of business, such as Disney’s Magical Express, onsite buses and the Monorail.