The official theme park mobile app designed for tablet and smart phone featured park information, dining reservations, attraction wait times and more. The app kept growing!

I was one of several information architects working on this mobile app for both iOS and Android platforms. I developed wireframes, process flows, and

Over the year on this project, I've contributed to every incremental release, developing detailed wireframes and functional specifications, process flows; providing support for QA and IPR (internal page review); and maintaining creative deliverables and documentation on an internal project wiki.

Process Flows

Process flows (also referred to as user flows and screen flows) mapped the happy paths of feature user tasks. These examples come from 2 major user tasks:

Booking a dining reservation
Adding an event to their itinerary

Screen Flow mapping the various tasks that can be completed within the Itinerary feature

User flow mapping the Book Dining feature of the MDX mobile app.

Printed and posted in the project war room during IPR (internal page review), this site map of the mobile app helped onboard new team members and orient team members the weeks before product launch.

The Journey

I was added to this project after design had already started. I came in with the knowledge and experience from an earlier phase of Next Gen Experience (NGE) and this mobile app project was the natural evolution of the NextGen project.

As one of the first information architects, I supported the team with understanding essential use cases and task models, and feature maps. This background helped to distill the priorities for the eventual mobile app project later on.

Essential Use Cases, circa 2009

Early mindmaps of NextGen Experience looking at Profile, circa Jun 2010

Project Outcome

As of Dec 2021, the My Disney Experience has gone through many versions and has achieved 4.6 average rating on the Apple App Store and 4.1 average rating on Google Play Store.

The mobile app was first released on August 2012 on the App Store. We monitored the ratings and reviews for each platform and set alerts for app breakdowns created by fans and content creators.

Some notable reviews found:

Learnings

I'm writing this case study 9 years later (Dec 2021) and reflecting on my personal takeaways...

Was part of an AMAZING team. The synergy we had working on this project – Dan McCollum, Han Nguyen, Eunha Kim, Ariel Hosmann, not to mention Chris Chandler, Trish Dacumos
Learned about mobile design and the nuances for designing for touch and different screen sizes
Learned how to create interactive mobile prototypes for usability testing in AxureRP
Worked closely on an agile team on planning, design, and development sprints.
Lots of late hours iterating, testing, and collaborating on navigation, interaction, and user flows