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Clarifying Questions
Before diving in, I would want to align on scope with my interviewer across a few dimensions, since “design a mobile app for Disney theme parks” is broad enough to mean very different things depending on context.
Are we designing from scratch or improving an existing product? Disney already operates My Disney Experience, a mature app launched in 2013 handling park tickets, dining reservations, Lightning Lane bookings, and its paid Genie+ line-skip service priced at roughly $25 to $35 per person per day. Knowing whether we are greenfielding or iterating changes what genuine “new value” looks like.
Which park or set of parks are we targeting? Walt Disney World in Orlando spans four major parks and two water parks across a 27,000-acre resort, whereas Disneyland in Anaheim is a far more compact two-park operation. The complexity of itinerary optimization scales dramatically between the two.
Which user side are we optimizing for? The in-park guest experience, back-of-house cast member tooling, and Disney operations teams all have legitimate mobile needs. I want to confirm we are focusing on the guest-facing product.
Is there a specific business objective driving this? Disney Parks generated roughly $8.4 billion in operating income in fiscal year 2023. A feature that improves Genie+ retention or perceived value has a very different ROI target than one aimed at reducing call-center volume.
Are there constraints around data privacy or notification fatigue? Push notification permission rates hover around 50 to 60 percent on iOS globally, so a solution that depends heavily on interrupting guests mid-day needs to be designed with restraint from the start.
For this answer I will assume we are improving Disney’s existing My Disney Experience app, specifically for Walt Disney World guests who have purchased Genie+, and that our primary business goal is improving guest satisfaction and perceived Genie+ value. I will focus on a proactive, automated itinerary re-optimization feature that reduces the manual cognitive burden of continuously monitoring and adjusting a Genie+ plan throughout a long park day, since this is a genuine, well-documented frustration that the current app does not adequately solve.
Product Description
My Disney Experience is Disney’s flagship guest-facing mobile app, first launched in 2013 and now used by an estimated 50 to 60 million guests annually across Walt Disney World alone. The app covers the full pre-trip and in-park journey: purchasing park tickets and annual passes, booking dining at over 200 table-service restaurants, managing hotel reservations, and since 2022, purchasing and managing Genie+, Disney’s paid Lightning Lane line-skip service that replaced the legacy free FastPass+ system. Genie+ is priced at $25 to $35 per person per day depending on date, with individual Lightning Lane selections for the most popular attractions like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance or TRON Lightcycle Run sold separately at $7 to $20 per ride per person on top of the base Genie+ fee.
The app’s core planning functionality is already mature. Guests can view real-time wait times across all four parks, mobile-order food at quick-service locations to skip counter queues, and book Lightning Lane return windows through Genie+ starting at 7 a.m. each day. Disney’s parks business had roughly 56 million domestic park visits in fiscal 2023, and Genie+ adoption among day guests at popular parks during peak season is estimated at 40 to 60 percent on any given day. The genuine remaining gap is not in displaying information, which the app does reasonably well, but in the cognitive labor it still places on guests to continuously re-monitor and re-optimize their own plan as real-time conditions change throughout a 10 to 12 hour park day. That active, repeated decision-making effort is mentally taxing precisely during a vacation meant to feel effortless and magical, and it is the problem I want to solve.
Define Goal
The core problem is that Genie+ guests must currently act as their own real-time operations planners throughout the day, manually checking wait times, availability windows, and geographical sequencing every 30 to 60 minutes to keep their itinerary optimized. This ongoing cognitive load contradicts the relaxed, immersive experience Disney’s brand promises and undermines the perceived value of a $25 to $35 per person daily add-on.
The goal I want to focus on is: reduce the active, manual planning burden for Genie+ guests by proactively surfacing re-optimization opportunities, so guests can spend more time experiencing the park and less time managing an app.
My north star metric is the percentage of Genie+ subscribers who complete their park day without manually opening the itinerary planner more than twice, measured via session-level analytics within the app. I choose this over alternatives like “attractions experienced per day” because it directly captures the reduction in cognitive burden rather than a pure throughput proxy. A guest who experiences seven attractions while barely touching the app has had a better day than one who experiences nine attractions after spending two hours micromanaging the app. Genie+ satisfaction survey data from third-party research groups like Touring Plans and TouringPlans.com consistently cite planning complexity as a top-three frustration, validating this framing.
User Segmentation
Guests
Power-planner Genie+ subscribers: Adults aged 28 to 45, typically parents, who have researched Disney touring strategy extensively, purchase Genie+ on every visit, and already know how to use it but find the ongoing monitoring exhausting. High retention risk if the effort-to-reward ratio of Genie+ feels too high year over year.
First-time or occasional visitors with Genie+: Adults aged 25 to 55, often celebrating a milestone trip, who purchased Genie+ on a recommendation but lack the park-specific knowledge to optimize it manually. High willingness to accept automated suggestions because they have no competing mental model of “what they should be doing.”
Families with children aged 3 to 10: Parents who desperately need their attention freed from a phone screen and directed toward their children. Even a 20-minute reduction in active app-management time per hour translates directly into more present, more enjoyable parenting during the visit. Churn risk on Genie+ renewals is high if the service felt more like homework than help.
Guests with mobility limitations or accessibility needs: A meaningfully large segment at Disney, given Disney’s strong ADA accommodation culture. For this group, a routing suggestion that ignores accessible pathways, realistic walking distances, or attraction boarding options is not just unhelpful but potentially harmful to their experience.
I will focus primarily on power-planner Genie+ subscribers for this design, because they generate the highest Genie+ revenue per visit, have the clearest pain point around ongoing monitoring burden, and are most likely to churn from Genie+ purchases on future visits if the product does not improve. The solution I design for them will also deliver real value to the other segments as a secondary benefit.
Pain Points
Drawing from Touring Plans’ annual Walt Disney World guest satisfaction surveys, Disney community forums like the DIS Unplugged, and well-documented UX research patterns around decision fatigue, here are the five most significant pain points for Genie+ subscribers today.
