Automated Wait Times

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS parks

Date

2022

End Client

Work done by Rebecca Bar for Chaos Theory Studios

Role

Product Requirements Gathering
UX Strategy
UX Research
UX Writing
UX Design
UI Design
UX Project Management

Identitifed, aligned & implemented functionality & design or the Park team’s new application

The Universal Studios Theme park Rides and Attractions team was using a legacy app developed n the 90’s to update Park showtimes, ride operation hours, and character appearance times to the guest mobile app.

With the parks growth and imminent opening of the new EPIC™ park, Universal decided to invest in a legacy software redesign to address evolving user and business needs while fixing problems and making the software easy to use and accessible to differently-abled team members.

We led the UX strategy, research, and design for that effort.

We identified and implemented design and functionality opportunities based off testing, and crossfuctional ideation and workshops.

This initiative was a consolidation of different tools and processes. Product requirements would change often based on lack of user understanding and workflow and backend capabilities.

We recommended and then conducted Usability testing with the rides and attraction team managers and employees to discover opportunities and functionality they needed and would make it easy for them to do their jobs well.

Some capabilities we designed for phase 1:

IMPACT:

View and edit (depending on permissions) attractions/queues connected to the admin console
View and set the guest-facing / displayed wait time (standby) and statuses (standby and single rider)
Publish the guest-facing / displayed wait time or status to downstream
Setup and configure a new attraction/queue
Modification or removal of an attraction
Set the status of an individual attraction to closed, ride full, weather delay, brief delay, seasonal closure, opens at, closes at, virtual line only, next show at, coming soon, and any other previous or customized messaging
Set the status of multiple attractions at once

Process

We facilitated a design and collaboration process with Product and Business leadership which included cross-functional workshops to work through features and capabilities the new software needs and align on a UX process while offering transparency and an opportunity for focused ideation sessions at strategic points during our work process.

Some improvements we made:

Moved spacing to an 8px grid
Used new universal GDS grid
Used new GDS components when we could to speed up development inc; text components
Helped product define features needed by auditing the legacy app, interviewing users and stakeholders to deeply understand workflow and needs
Escaped the back and forth deliberation process by communicating core usability design principles and providing usability test insights that informed our design of the product.