Disney's Where to Buy Experience
Helping 30 million kids around the world find Club Penguin toys
About this project
In 2010, I was a Web Designer working on the Club Penguin website. Club Penguin is a virtual game for children (massive multiplayer online role playing game also known as MMORPG). The website was a gateway to the virtual game, where children of ages 6-12 play online games, earn virtual coins and purchase virtual items. The game environment, lovable characters and stories were a large part of the magical experience.
The UX Challenge
Design an interactive web experience that makes finding Club Penguin merchandise and toys at physical stores extremely easy, fun for children, parents and grandparents who buy these adorable things for little ones.
Process
Discovery → Understand → Success Criteria → Explorations → UX Design → Product Photography → Interaction Design → Development → Shipped
DISCOVERY PHASE
Why finding toys wasn’t easy using the existing page
Users could see new merchandise on the Club Penguin website on the What's New page. A handful of North American stores were also listed there to inform customers where to find Club Penguin toys. So, why did it still prove challenging to know where to buy toys?
The toy hunt was real
The first clue was that stores did not carry every type of Club Penguin merchandise. For example, one might be able to find Penguin Plush Toys at Walmart, but not Club Penguin Apparel. You'd have to visit every retailer on the list to know that Playsets are sold at Target.
International retailers unlisted
Another problem was specifically for customers outside Canada and the US who could not see retailers according to their country. The only time users login was to play the game. On the other hand, content pages such as the Where to Buy page did not require login. Without authentication, the location of the user was unknown, making it hard to show retailers according to their country. And, there was no way for users to set or change their location manually.
The first two goals
Users should be able to:
See which toys retailers do or do not carry.
Change the location to see where to buy toys in any country.
UNDERSTAND PHASE
Defining our primary user
We knew that the Where to Buy experience would be improved if we achieved the first two goals. But what we learned through user research was that few parents spent time looking for information on where to buy the toys their kids wanted. Kids told parents which toys they wanted, while parents did most of the toy hunting in the real world, not online.
Could we make it easy for kids to guide their parents and grandparents on where to find toys? How might we design an experience that is simple, engaging and entirely catered to our primary audience, kids!? We added a third goal for the redesign:
Simple to use, understandable and appeals to 6-14-year-olds.
Things we ruled out
The first thing we ruled out was the idea of showing all available inventory at a particular store. It was not feasible for the web team to track inventory at retailers around the world. That would have been a highly effective solution if we had the resources and business appetite to build a rich e-commerce store.
Another idea we ruled out was to show every Club Penguin product on the Where to Buy page. Assembling the vast catalogue was a high effort, requiring photographing and doing post-production work on hundreds of items and writing web marketing copy for each. It would also be a considerable effort to maintain this when toys are released or removed from distribution around the world.
We added a fourth goal:
Be low effort to produce and keep up to date.
SUCCESS CRITERIA
Our Four Goals
The solution should:
Allow users to see which toys retailers do or do not carry.
Allow users to change the location and see where to buy toys in any country.
Be appealing, simple to use, and understandable for 6-14-year-olds.
Be low effort to produce and keep up to date.
DESIGN PHASE
Explorations
From the several ideas we tried. the following two options were most promising. By testing them with kids, we were able to narrow down the final solution. Kids of all ages found it easier to use Option 1 due to logo recognition and usability.
Option 1
Option 2
Shipped Solution
The result
Within minutes of this experience going live, Club Penguin fans and content creators flocked to tumblr and other blogs to rave and discuss the perks of the brand new experience. It was one of the most satisfying reactions to a project so early in my career. It was a great joy to see our hard work result in joy experienced by millions of kids worldwide.
