Disney Parks have consistently been touted as among the top theme parks experiences not only in the US, but across the globe. This can be to attributed to their dedication to immersion — staff, known as “Cast Members”, are directed to stay in character within the themed areas they are placed in, and to interact with guests in a uniquely Disney manner, down to the smallest actions and mannerisms. Depending on which area of the parks you wander through, specific scents are pumped out from air vents, the eyes are kept constantly engaged through incredibly immersive themed decor, and ambient noise plays through well-hidden speakers.
I was fortunate enough to go on vacation to Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL this past August. As a Disney superfan and UX practitioner, I was incredibly excited. It was my first time, and even Florida’s August heat and humidity couldn’t dampen my spirits. From what I’d read online, Disney takes great pride in what they call “Imagineering” — their own take on collaborative design and engineering.
This heavy emphasis on Imagineering means that parks, rides, and even merchandise are well thought out and meaningfully conceptualized… usually.
During my trip, I was suckered into purchasing a DIY droid-building experience at Hollywood Studios’ Galaxy’s Edge.
Admittedly, the experience itself was pretty neat. However, for nearly two hundred bucks a pop (I got the bundle which included a droid-carrying backpack and a ‘personality chip’), the final product left something to be desired. Build quality aside (cheap-ish plastic & weak magnetic components), something that stumped me immediately was that the droid’s on-off switch was located inside the toy.
This meant that whenever users wanted to operate the droid, they’d have to crack the two halves apart (which was a pain in itself), turn it on and put the halves back. This whole finicky process would repeat when it came time to turn it back off. Leaving it on after playtime was not an option either — the droid ran completely off six AA batteries with no way of recharging it save for replacing the dead batteries themselves.
For a toy that I think I can safely infer was designed for children, user-centered design didn’t seem to play much of a role in the conception of this toy. A fair bit of strength was required to prise the two halves of the droid apart as well to access the switch — it is consistently taking me a couple of tries just to successfully do it. The surface of the droid is pretty smooth as well, and it’s difficult for little hands to get a good grip.
To me, it seemed like the product designers did not conduct very much user testing or even observe users interacting with the toy. During the building experience itself, I could observe the other customers being similarly confused as the cast members in the store tried to explain how the toy worked. The situation could have been someone remedied by sending customers home with an operation manual lest they forget the instructions amid the hustle and bustle of the theme park. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option either.
This article by Nielsen Norman group (NNg) lays out some design guidelines to keep in mind when designing for children. One guideline that stood out to me and was applicable in this situation would be “Reduce cognitive load by designing self-explanatory interfaces and preventing possible errors.”
“A good design (whether intended for kids or for adults) reduces cognitive load and minimizes the mental resources needed to understand and interact with the system. When the users are young, their working memory capacity is even smaller than that of adults, so it is crucial to pay attention to how much information your users need to carry around to use your interface.” — NNg
There was nothing intuitive at all about how to access the on-off switch, no icon or anything of the sort inscribed anywhere on the entire toy, and the nondescript grey switch inside the toy took even me a couple of minutes to locate. It was frustrating trying to figure this out, never mind for children who have a lower working memory capacity and a shorter attention span.
One fix I can immediately think of would be to simply locate the on-off switch on the outside of the drone’s body — this might be difficult, though probably not impossible, due to the personalized nature of the toy (different shell colors can be chosen to make a droid that is uniquely yours). At the very least, there should be instructions carved onto the body of the toy, or provided in a paper handout, that demonstrate how to get to the switch. The switch itself should absolutely not be a plain grey square, but again, something more intuitive to ease users’ cognitive load, perhaps a simple on-off switch with symbols etched into it.
This experience corroborated my learnings when I took UI for Children with Dr. Jakki Bailey at the iSchool, one out of many is as follows: designing for children is a whole different ball game, and to design for a child, sometimes we need to think like a child.