byron gronseth | creative - Disneyland Dining Reservations

Dining Reservations at Disneyland and Disney World

My team designed the new and updated mobile dining reservations feature for both the official Walt Disney World® app and the Disneyland® app. As the Lead Designer on the project, I worked closely with my UX counterparts to concept and design the end to end booking experience on mobile. I was personally responsible for both ideating and executing on visual design & UI documentation. Together, we worked directly with senior executives, key Food & Beverage business stakeholders, product managers and engineers to estimate, workshop, design and launch a simplified and easy to use digital utility for park guests to help book and modify dining plans on the fly, before or during their vacation.

Extending a Design Platform

This was one of the first major features in the Walt Disney World® mobile app to utilize the new design language for Disney digital products moving forward, and our first time building an end to end booking and reservation flow into our apps. The design system we implemented was a breath of fresh air, clean and simple, using new interaction and visual design patterns to make bookings simple, easy, and even a little fun.

My Role

As Lead Designer on a small team, I led and art directed every aspect of design for the booking feature from concept to execution, relying on deeply talented interaction and junior designers to own many of the detailed design tasks. My role was primarily leading and facilitating concept and whiteboard sessions with our designers, driving both high level and low level tactical creative vision for the team to work towards, estimations and resource management, managing streams of workflow and process, as well as occasionally getting in the weeds to help support our designers. I had the opportunity to present to senior leadership and executives, build strong relationships with business partners, mentor junior designers, drive the myriad visual design tasks and documentation, as well as build and iterate on InVision prototypes for the feature.

Process

As with most of my work at Disney, I can't go into too much detail, but our process was fast and very scrappy in the design and discovery phases. My design partners and I worked through a ton of interaction and visual concepts to try and solve all of the different aspects of the user journey, from start to finish. Regular jam sessions and check-in’s with engineers, product managers and key stakeholders were essential. We waded through layers of stakeholder review cycles and approvals with patience and poise, sharing ideas with storyboards, prototypes and rapid iteration & refinement.