Francis Laura Palacio

A way-finding app that tackles Westwood’s sidewalk congestion for pedestrians through community and city participation.

Westwood Village, known to be the shopping and dining community directly south of UCLA, is a heavily congested hub for all sorts of travel; cars, buses, bikes, scooters, and even pedestrians. Not only is it a bustling area because of heavy traffic, but it’s also due to the many hazards that slow down travel, such as street closures, construction, or even accidents.

Our team discovered that, specifically for college students, walking around Westwood Village was a hassle. Westwood’s main population is college students, and for many, foot travel is their only option to get around Westwood. The common hazards that occur in the community often leave these students struggling to get to their destinations on time or leave them in dangerous situations where they must put their safety at risk to travel (such as jaywalking). We wanted to create an app that would help students navigate the safest and most efficient routes possible to get to their destinations through Westwood Village despite the many hazards and blockages in the city. We also wanted to help promote Westwood to develop more unity within its student population, since many students feel like Westwood is not as popular as it was in previous years.

Introducing: Get 2 Steppin’. Get 2 Steppin’ is a mobile app that users can use when traveling around Westwood. Users can view current hazards in Westwood that may affect their traveling, as well as report hazards that haven’t been added into the system yet or clear hazards that aren’t there anymore in real time. These hazards allow Get 2 Steppin’ to calculate the best routes possible for pedestrians to get to their destination safely and on time. Not only is Get 2 Steppin’ a useful way-finding app, but it’s also helpful with bringing the Westwood community together. The app includes several Neighborhood and Street profile pages that display important information about each street, such as popular times, upcoming events, and the restaurants and shops located on that specific street. Users can use these profile pages to discover new locations and hotspots in the neighborhood, fostering better unity in Westwood.

Tasked with redesigning the outdated travel wallet, my group and I teamed up with MaCher to create a completely new experience with the MaCher Travel Wallet and its digital companion, the Starboard app.

In the spring of 2023, my team Studio Wallet Workers worked alongside MaCher to redesign one of their five key products: the travel wallet. Through the course of this 8 week project, we learned that the current user experience with the travel wallet is dull and outdated. Our goal was to give a second life to the standard travel wallet, allowing our users to customize the wallet to their needs while also ensuring a strong sense of security with their documents.

By interacting with current travel wallet designs, as well as researching the main characteristics and uses of a travel wallet, we learned that security, modularity, and sustainability are the core needs when it comes to travel wallets. We also discovered that travel wallets are starting to be slowly discontinued from cruise lines, which are their main suppliers, solely because people are finding less and less use for them as the travel world moves towards digital documents.

With these insights in mind, we decided to move towards a modular design for our proposed MaCher Travel Wallet. Our travel wallet includes two parts: the passport wallet where users can store up to two passports, and the main wallet where users can store their phones, cards, and documents. This allows users to attach and detach the passport holder from the main wallet so that they can leave their passport holder in a safe place in their room during the trip. Besides our physical model, we also created Starboard, a digital travel companion app to create a unique experience for users. With Starboard, we want to inspire travelers to do more with their cruise trips, allowing users to use our app to explore things to do onboard, earn badges to encourage more exploration, and save pictures to their digital Starboard scrapbooks to keep the memories going even after the trip ends.

This redesign of Genie+ aims to enhance the visitor experience by restructuring service functionality, improving the digital user interface, and better integrating the service within the physical park space, transforming the guest experience for Disneyland Resort's infamously unpopular "skip-the-line" service.

Since its launch in October 2021, Disneyland Resort's Genie+ has faced widespread dislike from both first-time visitors and regular park-goers. The service, intended to enhance the visitor experience by allowing guests to skip regular queues for select attractions, has been criticized for its complex interface, inefficient booking system, and overall inability to meet guests' needs. Key issues include long waits for return times to be called, increased phone dependency, and a confusing user experience on the Disneyland app, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction among park guests.

During the 16-week redesign project, several key insights emerged from my user research and testing. Interviews with park guests at Disneyland revealed that the long waits for return times and the need for constant phone usage are major pain points, often leading to one person in the group becoming the designated "planner." Besides the interviews, I followed two test subjects around Disneyland where they interacted with the current structure of Genie+, which highlighted the inefficiency of the booking process, with return times not being held or updated live, and an overly text-heavy interface complicating navigation. Lastly, after sending out a mass online survey for park visitors, I discovered that the ability to book multiple rides simultaneously would drastically increase the popularity of the service for 30 out of the 39 surveyees. These insights drove my redesign focus on improving the overall user experience by addressing these specific issues.

Due to the service's multi-world functionality, my redesign solution encompasses three fundamental areas of improvement: restructuring service functionality, enhancing the digital user interface, and seamlessly integrating the service within the physical park space. For the first portion of my solution, which delves into the structure of how the service works, I implemented a new booking structure that allows guests to book 2 experiences at once instead of 1. This implementation encourages guests to use one of their reservations for one of the more popular rides and use their second reservation in the meantime while they wait for the first ride, diminishing the feeling guests get from not using Genie+ to its fullest capabilities. The second part of my redesign prioritizes enhancing the digital user interface. The new UI supports the implementation of a 6-minute timer by incorporating an onboarding screen at the start of the booking process, reducing guest stress. Additional enhancements include a sticky timer for constant visibility, alternative sorting methods for attractions, and a revamped home page emphasizing the two-attraction booking structure. Lastly, to improve how Genie+ interacts with the physical space of the parks, my solution implements a better check-in process for guests when their return times are called at their booked attractions. Instead of having to open up their phone and search for their return time QR codes in the app, guests can simply add their tickets to their mobile device's wallets and tap their phones to the Genie+ scanners at the front of the attraction. This holistic approach to redesigning Genie+ solves several of the pain points found in my research and ensures that guests feel confident that Genie+ is a beneficial add-on to their trip.