LEGOLAND Resort App
Introduction:
As a former theme park architect and art director, I continuously endeavored to enhance the guest experience through the built environment. As I transition into digital product design, I still keep thinking about this particular problem.
As a UX/UI designer, my goal is to improve the digital experience for guests at theme park resorts by redesigning the app and providing optimal solutions.
Role: Solo project. UX/UI designer
Tools: Pen & Paper, Figma, FigJam, Photoshop, and Marvel
Duration: 4 months
Background
Theme park resorts are facing significant challenges in providing a consistent and high-quality guest experience across multiple locations. The management of theme park resorts is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with new generations of guests who demand more accurate ride wait time information and more effective queue line systems. While new digital technologies are being implemented to improve guest satisfaction, the results vary greatly, making it crucial for theme park brands to invest in the right software and hardware technologies that can deliver the desired outcomes. By addressing these challenges head-on, theme parks can ensure that their guests have an unforgettable experience every time they visit, which can lead to increased loyalty and revenue.
Problem
•The quality of guest experience at theme parks varies dramatically. A theme park brand with multiple locations struggles to provide a consistent experience to users.
•The management of theme park resorts remain a challenge. New generations of theme park guests are demanding more accurate ride wait time information and more effective queue line systems.
•New technologies are being implemented into existing and new theme parks in hope of boosting guest satisfaction, but the results differ dramatically.
Solution
•Identify theme park app users and find solutions to improve guest experience while they visit their favorite theme park resorts.
•Provide interactive features, reduce friction at queue lines, and enhance overall guest experience.
•Provide users with accurate and live information about the status of rides and attractions.
Design Process
EMPATHIZE
Conduct secondary research, primary research and market research. I synthesize my primary research .
DEFINE & IDEATE
Brainstorm solutions based on the research and create HMW Statements and User Stories
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Conduct card-sorting to best understand how to structure my app’s content. I create a sitemap and user flows of red routes for the app.
GUERILLA USABILITY TESTING
Sketch or design important screens of my proposed app and test a low-fidelity prototype.
WIREFRAMING
Create wireframes for my red routes
DESIGN SYSTEMS
Create a style guide
HIGH-FIDELITY SCREENS
Create high-fidelity designs of my red route screens
PROTOTYPING
Prototype my solution using Figma and add animations
TESTING
Conduct two rounds of usability testing to gather insights and improve my product.
Empathize
Secondary Research
Through academic studies, articles, and industry reports, I learned about the pain points and trends in the current themed entertainment industry.
Main factors impacting theme park guest experience:
1. Over-crowding during peak seasons.
2. In-app park maps are difficult to use.
3. Queue lines: guests can get frustrated with long queue lines.
4. Bag storage lockers: inefficient use of guest time.
5. Live feed: Real time queuing time updates, and attraction wait time displays.
Heuristic Analysis
Screener Survey
To get a better idea of my target user. Identify theme park app users and find solutions to improve guest experience while they visit their favorite theme park resorts.
Participant Characteristics:
•Theme park goers
•Smartphone user
•People who go to theme parks
•Teenagers or adults
After the survey, I selected 5 participants for the research interview.
User Interviews
After carefully crafting my interview questions, I conducted 5 moderated interviews.
During the interview, my main focus was on finding potential solutions to the following core questions:
What factors cause poor guest experience at theme parks?
What are some of the positive experiences people have?
What type of information do people want to get from theme park apps?
What are the negative experiences and frustrations people have at theme parks?
Initial insights from the interviews:
Certain guests rely on the official theme park app during their entire visit.
Guests in general doesn’t mind a wait time up to 45 mins.
By adding essential information within the app, theme park guests can find answers quickly without asking for a park employee.
Note: the interview notes and transcripts are being analyzed in the next phase.
Affinity Map
By extracting crucial interview conversations and distilling them down into short phases, I can view the data points through a holistic perspective. The next step is to organize the information into categories and discover trends and patterns.
Keywords:
•Guest Types
•Digital Maps Vs. Paper Maps
•Convenience
•Efficient use of time
•Guest Service Information
Empathy Map
Upon analyzing the data and themes, I created an aggregated empathy map to better understand the users for the theme park app.
Persona
Based on the research and interviews, I identified two personas for the theme park app.
Persona 1 - Emily represents parents with small age children.
Persona 2 - Brad represents young adults who are heavy users of digital products.
“Waiting in line is very stressful and hard to keep my children entertained.”
“The estimated wait times are not updated instantly and not accurate.”
Jobs-to-be-Done
To purpose of the JTBD exercise is to understand what my users’ needs are and what is important for them. It will help me tremendously to stay focused on the solutions for users during the design phase.
Minimize the time waiting in line before getting on rides.
Get the most value with the money spent at theme parks.
Maximize the number of memorable moments by enjoying what theme park has to offer.
Reduce the walking distance from one area of the park to the next.
Take as many photos with theme park characters
How Might We
Can I reframe the problem?
I’ve gathered a lot of helpful information from secondary research, competitive analysis, and user interviews, but I needed some direction on how to truly solve the problem. By asking the critical questions, I seek to solve the problems I defined through the next stage of the project.
How might we create more memorable moments for families at theme parks?
How might we entirely remove the wait time at theme park rides?
How might we enhance the guest reservation experience at theme parks?
How might we provide useful information to guests in real time?
Top Insights
Guests’ anticipations are high at theme parks.
Reduce friction at queue lines for rides, and guest amenities are essential to the overall experience.
Users want to get problems solved quickly and find information immediately.
Certain users are willing to pay more for premier experience.
Ideate
User Story - MVP
With top insights and empathy maps in mind, I started to write the user stories and organize the stories in the order of their importance. By using the “numerical system”, user stories listed as “1” ranks high in the user stories and are selected as the MVP ( Minimal Viable Product). This process will help me to define critical and frequent paths that users take to complete tasks within the app.
User Flow
The purpose of the user flows are to identify the critical paths users tend to follow while using the theme park app. The process ties directly to the red routes I am developing in the next phases.
Sketches
During the sketching and wireframing phase of the design process, I created two main red routes based on the MVP. The “purchase tickets” flow and the “map” flow. I can freely explore my ideas through rough sketches without many constraints. From the initial sketches, I convert the design into digital format through rapid wireframe - low fidelity screens via Figma.
Guerilla Usability Test
I created the usability prototypes from the Marvel App. The tests were conducted remotely online with 5 participants joining the 15 min-testing sessions.
Findings:
The checkout process should be clear and simple. It is better to have users focus on one of the checkout tasks per screen. The users were able to understand the map function and the ticket purchase function during the testing. The quick testing with initial hand sketches of the app design was very useful and informative. It helps to validate certain aspects of the design quickly and enables me to discover issues with the current screens.
· Sometimes, users are not sure what they are supposed to do next at the map screen.
· They cannot understand that they can pan around the maps shown.
· Not enough screens created for the map feature.
Wireframe
With the top insights and empathy maps in mind, I started to write the user stories and organize the stories in the order of importance. By using the “numerical system”, stories listed as “1” ranks high in the user stories and are selected as the MVP ( Minimal Viable Product).
Branding
Style Guide
Reimagine the “LEGOLAND” theme park app for LEGOLAND resorts. Bring more “Magic Moments” to people.
Rationale: this is in-line with the user group that the LEGOLAND brand targets. As part of the interactive experience dimension, we can enhance guest experience through mobile app use and let the digital experience tie back to the physical experience at the LEGOLAND theme parks.
LOGO
Visual Style
Design
High Fidelity Screens
At this stage of the theme park app design, I started to develop and polish the final visual designs of the red routes based on the style guide I created. In the meantime, as I continue to iterate on the design, I also updated the style guides to better reflect the final design of the product.
Prototyping
With the high fidelity screens and animation design, I get to build a more functional and interactive prototype and make the theme park app come to life. The prototype can demonstrate to users how the product would look and feel.
Testing
Usability Testing
I conducted 5 usability tests to get a sense of how these high-fidelity designs would hold up with real users.
My initial objectives and goals were to identify the following:
· Initial impressions of home screen and map navigation screen.
· Uncover usability problems in the “find the attraction” red route.
· Uncover usability problems in the “Purchase tickets” red route.
· Uncover usability problems in the “Scan QR code” red route.
· Find out where the friction is for users.
Main Tasks for Participants:
The participants were given three main tasks.
• Task 1: Buy Tickets.
• Task 2: Find the Magic Theater.
• Task 3: Scan a QR code for more information.
Round # 1 - Critical Issues
Participants have issues with adding tickets to the shopping cart process. The location of the shopping cart icon can be confusing to some participants. A lot of the participants are used to seeing the shopping cart on the upper-right side of the screen.
Participants have confusions about the ticket type screen during task 1 – buy ticket process. They are not sure whether the tickets are for general admission or for specific attractions.
There are issues with how the wait times are shown on the map. The map itself has a lot of information and colors. The wait times do not stand out enough. In addition, users cannot quickly determine which attraction has the shorter wait period.
Updated Screens
Round # 2 - Critical Issues
The back button didn’t work properly for the checkout screens.
Map: Users not able to understand from “you are here” to “magic theater”
Information form/holders should be more inline with the actual payment and billing info format.
Conclusions
Goals Accomplished:
Provide theme park app users with more attractive UI experience.
Users can see live wait time updates from the map feature.
To get most current attraction information, users can scan the QR codes from the app.
Simple ticket purchase flow for users.
Key Learnings:
The initial research phase takes longer than expected as I was trying to identify problems to be solved and narrow down my focus.
The user interviews are challenging in the beginning, but getting easier with more interviews about the topic. It is crucial to ask the right questions to the users. It takes a lot of communication and patience to work on a project of this size.
Having design system set up at the early phase of a project will save time during the prototyping phase.
Prototyping is the most exciting part of the design process, as all the design and screens are coming together.
