"How tall IS he, anyway?"

Just a short and quick observation. When you're at any of the Disney parks, there are handy boards around that tell you how long the wait time is for each ride. This saves you from trekking across the length of the park only to find that the wait for Space Mountain is 2 hours.

If you hang around these boards you can hear how people plan and negotiate with each other. Which I was doing in Anaheim, when a family came by with their son. "Oooo, Splash Mountain is 55 minutes! David would like that." David, maybe 4 or 5 years old, nods vigorously. Then "Minimum 40 inches. Is he 40 inches? How tall IS he, anyway?" Parents look at each other blankly.

40" - 46" - 54" - who really knows how tall their kid is?

Because, of course, neither parent decisively knew. Kids that age sprout like bean stalks, and the last time you measured could have been 2 inches ago?

Once you get to the ride, the cast members have sticks to measure your kid. But if you're doing your planning at the board, it's a lot harder. It's actually impossible, because you can't measure at the board.

Easy experience design upgrade: measuring post located at all attraction boards, and everywhere else where people commonly stop to figure out their next ride.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and Pin Trading

The national motto of France is Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and it's also quite possibly the motto of everyone in the service industry in Paris. If you've ever been to a restaurant or cafe in Paris, you'll know what I'm talking about. I think it's the "egalité" part - equality - that trips up the service industry. Americans in Paris blog about this, the "I'm not your slave" attitude where people in the service industry try to prove you're not better than they are by not bringing you anything until they're good and ready, and smoking cigarettes while standing next to your table. .

I was interested in service at DLP because the service culture is so very different. US Disneys have incredible service. The cast members are cheerful, engaging, smiling, and helpful. The Japanese, a service-driven culture, excels at it even more than the US. At Disneyland Paris, the American training in service has clearly not quite caught up with the cast members. Rob was unable to get change from a few cast members who were standing in front of a pile of change. "It's not possible," they insisted, deadpan. All THREE of the cast members, while standing in front of about 30 Euros in change. 

I had even more fun with this when trying to trade pins. Pin trading is a very prescribed interaction. 

"May I see your pins," I ask the cast member.
"Of course," they smile, and hold out their lanyards for examination.

Anaheim cast member displaying pins in perfect form. Note the smile.

At this point you may trade any two of your pins for any two of their pins. Disney produces thousands of different types of pins, some unique to the park, some only available through trading. People are really into this. Fully grown adults, with children, will walk around the park with three pounds of pins around their necks. There are pin-only web sites for discussion and learning, pin trading stations in the park, even pin trading conventions. At Disney Tokyo, pin trading was so remarkably successful that they had to shut it down, because it changed the entire experience of the park. Now you can only buy pins there. Next time you're at a park, pay attention to people with pins. It's a not-so-secret club, a different layer to the Disney experience.

These people are wearing at least $150 in pins on their chests.

My collection. Sometimes it makes me happy just take them out and look at them at home.

At about $7 per pin, this is also quite a lot of money in Disney's pocket. And this is where Disneyland Paris is different from the US. Disneyland Paris has struggled because of the lower per-guest expenditure compared to US parks. Getting a guest to shell out even more money is just not happening. It's clear that DLP is trying to encourage pin trading, by having more cast members wear lanyards.

The cast members, however, are French. Not only do they not understand pin trading, they don't like being "summoned" to show their pins. And when they do, it wasn't unusual for me to be faced with some kind of egalité-demanding action on their part.

"I want that pin," one cast member said, pointing to my treasured Cheshire Cat. 
"I like that one," I said. "I want to give you this one."
"I can choose," she insisted. "That's the way it works. You choose mine, I choose yours. It's fair that way."
"That's not how it works," I protested.
"Yes it is," she says. And then she pulls her co-worker over. "She chooses and I choose, right?" Two against one. I lose.

In the end she got my Cheshire Cat, because I was just so bemused and shocked at this kind of assertiveness. I got the distinct impression that she knew exactly what the rules were. She just didn't want to live by them.

This wasn't the only time I had pin trading turned on its head in Paris either. The French are not okay with being in different positions of power. Certainly there were many cast members who understood the rules, even if they couldn't figure out how to display a lanyard correctly. But the attitude is just different. It was clear that they were not out to make a magical day for me. They had a job to do - making cotton candy, ringing up purchases at a register - and it did not involve some American coming and choosing pins from their collection while they had no say at all in the interaction.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

When Good Designs Go Bad

The person who designed FastPass should win an award. I'd like to see a statue of him next to Mickey Mouse in front of the castle. He was an experience design genius.

 If you're not familiar with it already, this is the system that lets you survive those "Crowd Level: 10" days. You stick your park ticket in a machine, it spits out another ticket with a time window that allows you to the front of the line. You then waltz off to find your smoked turkey leg or to trade pins or to ride something with a shorter line, returning later to smirk at schmucks in line while you cruise past them with your FastPass.

I wonder if Disney has ever tracked the amount of money that FastPass has made them. People standing in line spend zero money. People strolling through the park do - a T-shirt here, a Mickey-Mouse-shaped popsicle there - it must add up. The guests love it too. No one wants to stand in line. One of the most common complaints on Tripadvisor about Disney is how much standing in line your near-$100 ticket just bought you.

FastPass is a win-win system. Disney wins, guests win.

In Disneyland Paris, FastPass only kinda sorta worked. Return windows were shorter (15 minutes instead of 30 or 60). Rides broke down right when your return window opened, meaning you just wasted your precious FastPass on NOTHING.

Worst of all, the lines for FastPass were ridiculous. It was possible to stand in a 15-minute line to get a FastPass, so that you could later criss-cross the park to stand in line for another 30 minutes to get on a ride.

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See the hundred people here? All waiting to get a FastPass. And how many of them got it? About 15, since the ride broke five minutes after this photo was taken. They closed the FastPass station, but didn't tell the people who were standing in line. D'oh!

Once you got through the line to a machine, even getting a FastPass presents problems. In the US Disney Parks, you put your ticket in, you get a ticket out. Simple self-service.

Simple interface at a US FastPass kiosk

In Paris, getting a FastPass out of a machine was like getting a smile out of a Parisian waiter. Good luck with that, sucker! At each FastPass station, harried employees scuttled between machines, helping guests wrangle the machines into submission. I counted 2 employees for every four-machine station. Every once in a while, even the employees gave up with the tickets, and just opened the machine to manually force a FastPass to be printed.

Cast member helping a guest figure out how to scan his bar code.

One of the major problems in Paris is that there are at least THREE kinds of tickets being scanned by machines. Magnetic stripe tickets, bar code tickets, full A4 size printed-at-home tickets. Why DLP allows this I have no idea. But there were two kinds of scanner in each machine, and people couldn't figure out where their ticket should go.

I really think the bar code drawing tells me to put my ticket IN the slot. But no, you're supposed to slap it parallel to the surface of the machine. NOT intuitive. But it also needs to accommodate guests who printed their tickets in A4 paper at home.

According to another blog this two-reader system was supposed to be an improvement. But people ran the magnetic stripe backwards, stuck their bar code ticket IN to the machine (kinda like the drawing suggests) rather than putting it parallel to the surface, didn't know what to do with their printed-from-home tickets.  The instructions were non-existent or confusing. The printers were slow. Rather than taking a few seconds a ticket, it was taking 15 or 45 seconds a ticket. And with guests like the lady in front of me running 16 tickets at a time for her group, we were all in for a long wait.

Why Disney doesn't just issue one type of ticket is beyond me. Print-at-home tickets also exist here in the US, but are traded in for standardized tickets in Anaheim at the gate.

With design the devil's in the details - always. There's no reason FastPass can't work more smoothly, even with three kinds of tickets. Even creating a better graphic instruction and slapping on a sticker would help here.

If Disney does track how much money is spent when people have FastPasses, this would be an interesting question. How much money is not being spent at Disney when people are standing in FastPass lines?