Disney Parks Dine Reservation Add-Ons

Disneyland and Disney World guests will often make dine reservations prior to visiting the parks in order to plan out their itineraries. This is especially true if guests are celebrating something special, like a birthday or anniversary.

We saw an opportunity here to enhance the reservation experience by allowing guests to add “celebrations” (add-ons) to their reservations online. This would allow guests to customize their reservations ahead of time, reduce the volume of calls for the call centers, and potentially increase upsell profits.

Brand Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World
Platform Web
Role Product Designer
Year 2019

Problem

Disneyland and Disney World combined have over 40+ full service dining locations to serve the millions upon millions of guests that visit the parks every year. In order for guests to dine at these restaurants, they will have to make a reservation ahead of their trip as walk-in’s are generally not accepted due to the volume of reservations being made.

Before this project, guests already had the ability to make dine reservations online, but they were only able to select dates, times, and party size. If guests were celebrating something special, they would have to call into Disney in order to have that note added to their reservation. With this project, we wanted to simplify this process by allowing guests to add celebrations (add-ons) within the dine reservation flow.

Concepting Constraints

In order for us to meet the budget requirements set out by this project, we had to reuse as many existing online components as possible to reduce development costs. As such, we had to design within the constraint of an older UI platform. This proved to be a unique challenge as we quickly realized there were a lot of limitations within the older design system that forced us to get more creative with our solutioning.

Original design explorations and concepts

Interactions & Testing

We concepted many different interaction patterns for adding celebrations to a reservation. As such, we turned to user testing to figure out which concepts were the most intuitive and recognizable for our guests. Because the project was still under a NDA, we removed any imagery and copy that was related to Disney.