Magic on the High Seas,

Managed in the Palm of your Hand.

I worked as a Strategist with Disney Parks and Resorts Digital on a mission to cut wait times and increase fun memories at Disney’s worldwide theme parks. Known as “My Disney Experience,” the backbone of that strategy was load-balancing crowds at the park’s dining, attractions and entertainment experiences. From a digital content strategy perspective, that meant walking Guests through comprehensively pre-planning a vacation online and then offering a mobile app to manage the vacation while in-park. Additionally, the user experience was updated to improve interaction design, taxonomy, usability, metadata, search engine optimization and experience discoverability.

After successfully launching My Disney Experience in the theme parks, we were tasked with implementing the same transformation to Disney Cruise Line’s digital presence on web and iOS/Android mobile. This meant completely revamping the website and creating a ground-up native mobile app, called the Disney Cruise Line Navigator. There were distinct challenges we overcame on this project that made it especially rewarding when finished and delivered:

• A cruise product offering differs greatly from a theme park, which meant tailoring all aspects of Disney Cruise Line’s digital user experience while maintaining consistency with the theme park websites and mobile apps.

• A migration to a new CMS meant exploring and understanding updated functional capabilities to create new page templates which could be leveraged across all of Disney Parks & Resorts Digital.

• Building agreement on the Guest personas, core user journey and action pathways was important as we built three specific user experiences across web, native iOS and native Android to function optimally in various online/offline states.

• Unlike Disney’s theme parks which offered free Wi-Fi to Guests for using the in-park mobile app, the Disney Cruise Line Navigator mobile app would have to be used on a closed wireless intranet supported by the ship’s IT infrastructure, giving us specific technical parameters within which to create a seamless, helpful mobile app experience in both “At Home” and “On the Ship” states.