Friday, 11:30pm, Grand Salon A
Ever been in love?
We can all recall user experiences we admire. But do we love them? Emotional engagement is an enormously powerful driver in ensuring product success. One group of UX designers know this and understand how to build experiences that people not only engage with, but truly love. They are Disney’s Imagineers, and they’ve been doing it for over fifty years.
Originally formed to create Disneyland, the multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, architects and animators developed a process that fused technology, artistry and imagination to build engagement levels our industry can only dream of. Imagineers started without rulebooks to follow, but through their passion and design principles they created the world’s very first, and still best-loved, theme park.
This presentation examines those principles and discusses ways we can apply them to our own user experience design. It offers an entertaining journey through the Magic Kingdom and tells how the Imagineers got around their most difficult and demanding client, Walt Disney himself.
Principles include:
Capture imagination
Imagineers don’t do wireframes. Instead, experiences from Pirates of the Caribbean to the Contemporary Hotel began as conceptual paintings and models; works of art in their own right. This is more than planning a structure; it’s about capturing imagination and creating a shared vision of the future.
Tell a story
Designing a Disney attraction takes scriptwriters, storyboard artists, composers and lyricists. Spellbinding user experiences need strong storytelling. Stories give experiences a through-line and make them memorable.
Never break the spell
After Walt witnessed a cowboy crossing Tomorrowland, on his way to work in Frontierland, he devised a network of subterranean tunnels that would lattice his next park. Never again would the illusion be broken. Strong user experiences have consistency and never break their promise.
Use technology as a tool
From mechanizing Lincoln to America’s first monorail, Imagineers use technology in unexpected ways. In 1963 audio-animatronics made Tiki birds sing, and they have since embraced CGI puppetry, handhelds, even massively-multiplayer gaming. Technology is just one of the colours with which they paint their canvas.
Plus, plus, plus!
Walt wanted Disneyland to be ever-changing. He’d walk the park, chatting with guests and asking how rides should be improved. Their feedback ensured each experience was enhanced, expanded; made better. Today we call it user testing and iterative development. Walt called it “Plussing”.
Together we’ll learn how these principles shaped experiences that have stood for decades, loved by millions. We’ll see the early days of Disneyland, and the pitfalls of early product release. Walt himself gives us his original vision for Epcot, and we’ll examine its radically-revised realisation. Real-world examples will illustrate how UX designers can adopt the Imagineering spirit and introduce more play and passion into their work.
This talk is by a user experience professional with a tiny agency, a medium-sized client roster, and a large respect for Imagineering. It’s light-hearted and inspirational, aiming to reconnect us with the passions that brought us here. We love the work we do.
Let’s make sure our users love it too.
INSTRUCTOR
Michael Atherton
Michael Atherton is an independent User Experience consultant with a 12-year track record in delivering engaging interactive services to clients including the Sapient, TimesOnline, Virgin Media, 20th Century Fox and more. He is currently working quite a lot with the BBC, aiding the effort to transition content and navigation from the static to the semantic. Largely self-taught in Information Architecture, Michael lives in fear of one day being dragged before the IA High Council and being exposed as a fraud.
He has seen a lot of changes in the organisational structures and working practices of interactive agencies, but has never lost his sense of imagination and firmly believes in using emotional engagement to kickstart projects. He has spoken about semantic web and usability issues in London and Australia, but the IA Summit 08 is his first IA conference as either speaker or delegate, and
he’s a little bit scared.
He lives in Reading, England, but finds it much more efficient to say he lives in London, England.