What's Experience Design?

I went down to LA last week. It was kind of a tour of all my old haunts growing up in Los Angeles. We stopped for a few days in Ojai where had I attended astronomy camp when I was 16. I introduced Rob to the La Brea Tar Pits (literally "The The Tar Tar Pits," our tour guide translated for us) where mammoth bones were till being dug up under the busy streets of Los Angeles. And we made a stop at Universal Studios as well as my favorite past and present haunt, Disneyland.

I haven't been to Universal Studios Hollywood since I was a kid, and they've really expanded and spiffed up the place. They've got some of the most state-of-the-art motion simulator rides anywhere, including one where you enter Springfield with the Simpsons for a wild ride through Krustyland, and another where King Kong and dinosaurs attack your backlot studios tour tram. The rides are all beautifully done.

The Despicable Me Minion Mayhem ride doesn't open until later this year, so I paid $84 for my Universal Studios annual pass optimistically hoping that I can return later when the Minions arrive. It seemed like a total bargain. The Disneyland annual pass I bought last August - the price for that was $669. Yep, you got that right. $669. Almost eight times more than what I paid for an equal number of days at Universal studios.

What in the world is Disney doing that Universal is not to warrant such blind fork-over-my-money loyalty?

Janitor cart at Disney.

Disney is one of those very rare companies in the world that understand they are creating an experience rather than a product or a series of products. To execute Walt's vision of creating the "Happiest Place on Earth," the Disney company treats a visit to the park as a single cohesive magical experience rather than a piecemeal trip to rides and attractions. That means all the details, from the cast member costumes to the choice of bathroom tiles, every touch point the guest sees has been thoughtfully designed to create the sense that you have left your everyday world and gone to a place where everything is different, beautiful, magical.

So on California Screamin', a roller coaster in the nostalgically-themed Paradise Pier section of California Adventure, the ground underneath the roller coaster isn't asphalt, it's beach sand and reeds because Paradise Pier is the re-creation of an early American boardwalk, the kind commonly found in turn-of-the-century California beaches. They carry this theme through the landscaping, the buildings, the lettering advertising Disney's obiquitous (and mysteriously large) turkey legs. Even the janitor pushcart is themed. The long lines for Toy Story Mania are cooled by lazily rotating wooden ceiling fans.

They didn't build the coaster on sand, but it sure looks like they did.

Meanwhile, over at Universal Studios, guests who were hot waiting in line outside of Shrek's castle were treated to an industrial fan plunked on the concrete path to cool them down. And once they got inside Shrek's castle, they walked through passages which looked remarkably like a DMV corridor before they got into the themed ride.

Just what I think the inside of Shrek's castle looks like.

Disney is so thorough in thinking through each step of the experience that even their emergency protocols take the guest experience into account. Emergencies like fires. While I was at Walt Disney World a few years back, a fire broke out at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique in Orlando. This was a place where little girls were transformed every day into princesses by a legion of ladies-in-waiting who help them with dresses, hair, make-up, shoes, and most importantly, the attention and royal treatment that every princess needs. As I was talking to a mom waiting for her daughter to come back out, we noticed a subtle but sudden change of pace as the ladies in waiting quickly and efficiently gathered up their young charges and took them outside. The adults waiting in the store were evacuated by the staff.

What was magical about watching this is that the little girls hardly noticed. Their ladies-in-waiting stayed in character, keeping their voices gentle and even, bringing out magic wands and picture books, sitting under trees with the children, and reading to them while the fire department showed up and put out the electrical fire. With sirens completely off.

This type of coordination doesn't happen by accident. It happens because Disney had hired someone (probably a team of someones) to think very long and hard about the experience those little girls parents wanted for their princesses, and then made sure there were plans in place to preserve that experience from beginning to end.

"Design" is one of those newfangled terms people often don't agree on. Some people think it's about nice elegant curves, or extra functions that didn't exist before, or the right color on a phone. I think it's all of that but more than that. "Design" is taking that extra step in thinking about what it is you're doing - really taking the time to figure out what the vision is and how it fits into the world people want to have.

In the end, Disney's rides aren't eight times better than Universal Studio's. There aren't eight times more of them. But as a guest, the eight times more that I pay for my annual pass goes towards a kind of guarantee that I am buying a different kind of experience - the kind experience that requires planning what the bottom of a roller coaster looks like, and what happens if a blow dryer catches fire on my little girl's special day. That's worth $669 a year.