In mid 2014, Questus Studio hired me to consult for UX on a major overhaul of Universal Orlando's online ticketing system and general purchasing experience. The project was referred to as Denali at the time and was a deep dive research and overhaul for the way the company sold tickets.
Our first stage as a team was to map out the whole process visually so it could be presented as a roadmap to Universal executives, making sense of the user journey.
In the early stages of the project, there was a lot of education: explaining responsive design and minimal content strategy to UO's marketing and infrastructure people, and exploring was is and is not possible given the physical realities of theme parks and eCommerce solutions.
There was also a lot of mapping of the existing service, which had up until that point been very poorly documented.
In order to demonstrate how the ticketing process worked conceptually, and what options were and were not open to customers, there were a number of large, display size maps made of the website and the service.
Once we had sorted through and agreed how the process worked behind the scenes, I then got to work on innovating solutions, using a simple greyscale and single color wireframing system to cover a lot of ground as quickly as possible.
As ideas became of greater or lesser interest to the account managers and the development team, we began to narrow down on-screen solutions and flexible layouts, while still using the greyscale templates.
Eventually, we started making paper prototypes which folded in order to conceal information, in order to make basic tests of UI ideas and get basic reactions:
We then developed these into a set of wide and narrow expressions for quick testing, and checking with the technical people handling the website at UO's end, in order to determine the flexibility of the solution we had:
There were a huge amount of revisions, and eventually we were working to a standard Wireframe format, which can be seen evolving to its final form below. Wireframes were final deliverables on this Project.
