Lessons in UX: On Disney parks, crowd control, and “revenue opportunities”

Just got back from the Magic Kingdom park at Walt Disney World in Orlando… a great trip, highly enjoyable. When I was there I saw this:

That’s the brand new stage recently constructed in Tomorrowland to house a new show called Stitch’s Super Sonic Celebration. The show started in May and… is now gone. Yes, less than six weeks after it started they pulled the plug on a new attraction that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce.

Many people are wondering why they stopped it (many say because…well, it stunk), but I started thinking about it from a different angle – why did they decide to do it in the first place?

I started thinking about crowds, and crowd management.

I know nothing about Disney’s user experience/imagineering team and how they work, but I do know, from previous work regarding traffic patterns and crowd control, that they have people whose sole job is to monitor, analyze the crowd levels at all their parks. Disney is one of the most detail-oriented corporations in the world when it comes to theme park numbers – attendance, parks, ride volume, capacity, etc. They have people doing deep analysis on their numbers every day.

So, how does this point apply to the Stitch attraction? I’d wager that part of the motivation in building this stage area where it is – the heart of Tomorrowland – was to help “smooth out” crowd volume in the parks.

While we may look at Disney as the most “magical place on earth,” we also need to remember that it is also one of the most structured and planned environments that has ever been created. Right now, two of the major attractions in Tomorrowland section of the park – Space Mountain and the Tomorrowland Transportation Authority – are closed for refurbishment. Even before this refurbishment began, I’d bet that the number-crunchers at Disney were seeing an uneven mix of crowds in the various “lands” that are in the Magic Kingdom… which is not good for the bottom line.

Crowds spread out “unevenly” in the different lands means longer wait times –
which means park visitors have less opportunities to pass through the “hub” at the heart of every park. When the park visitors are in line for a ride, guess what they can’t do? THE CAN’T BUY ANYTHING. That’s bad for business. It also impacts their attitude and satisfaction with Disney – if too many customers leave complaining that all they did was “stand in line” it affects Disney’s reputation and “word of mouth” (I think that the FastPass system they instituted a few years back was intended to minimize this as well).

So, why did they do the Stitch stage show? As stated above, I think that it was to draw more people into Tomorrowland, to help spread out the crowds more. When the numbers came back that it wasn’t attracting as many people as they had hoped, they killed the attraction dead (heck, it may have negatively impacted traffic patterns).

While I was there I also noticed a new “dance party” show they had added to the many different parades they have during the day. I watched and enjoyed it, but keep traffic patterns in mind when I ask: why do they do these parades? I think it’s not purely for the show or “magic” of them”¦ it’s to get people out of the ride lines and towards the “hub” on a regular basis, so they can buy drinks, snacks and spend more money.

Sound cynical? Absolutely”¦ but I still love Disney. Just because I’m aware of how they control their environment and try and influence behavior doesn’t make me love them any less. It is, as I mentioned before, one of the most controlled user experiences in the world, and I marvel at how thought-through everything they do is.

And finally, that Stitch stage”¦ what will they do with it now? Well, I still think that a new show will arrive someday, and my guess is we will be seeing a robotic (and more profitable) Wall-E taking questions from the audience within a year at that location.

Just a hunch.

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