The UX of Everything: Creating My Next Job

Someone once said the best way to work a job you love is to create the job yourself. I’ve done that before, but it’s much easier when you’re already inside the company. The job I want to tackle next is in a field that is (sort of) new to me, so I’m going to try and state my case here for why the job should exist, and why I should be hired to do it.

First choice: Batman. I understand if that’s going to be a problem, so I won’t spend much time on it. I’m just putting it out there.

Second choice: Guest Product Manager/Theme Park Experience Specialist

I’m not married to the title, just the job. So let me give you some background there.

As I wrote earlier, I want to apply my 20 years of UX experience to making theme parks better. User Experience is all about telling the best story you can using research and observation to find and remove pain points. Theme parks have people who work on these things from an engineering perspective, but I haven’t yet seen any that approach it using UX methodology. The engineers use data, certainly, and they have many sources of this data, but (and correct me if I’m wrong, as this is a developing thesis) it’s not UX data.

Let me explain. When designing a product like a website, it’s common in UX to put different versions in front of users and run them through tasks. You compare the data to guide you in design decisions. But you can’t just ask people what they think about things. Often they don’t really know, or they try to tell you what they think you want to hear. You have to look at data from multiple sources. Their path through a site to find what they need, their facial expressions, how successful they are, and how many times they have to start over. Often they’ll say it was great, but the data shows they were frustrated, or completely failed their task.

The same can be applied to improving theme parks. What looks great on paper may not match user expectations or needs. And like in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. People will try to do what fits best, and become frustrated when blocked.

A great example is doors. Everyone loves to put handles on both sides of a door then add instructions that just add confusion. I once wrote Disney a long letter about how handles on their doors that I had to push were a UX nightmare. I was young and obsessive at the time. Handles = pull. Push plates = push. There’s research, people! No one likes that back-and-forth thing when they guess wrong about how to use a door.

But I digress.

The point is, you have to observe user data from multiple sources when you look for solutions to pain points. You also have to take into account the cost of making changes, and the impact on other aspects. Will it require too much time for something people are only moderately bothered by? Will it break something else? Will it look and work beautifully, but kill baby ducks?

Since spending more time at theme parks recently, I can’t help but notice these things. Guest experience pain points, or work area pain points. See that line that keeps bunching up and not moving quickly? It’s because the sun is shining onto parts of the line and people are trying to stay in the shade as long as possible. That ride has a traffic jam in front of it all the time. Why is that, and is it something we can easily fix? This section of the park was built for too few people and it quickly turns into a mess of folks going in all directions. How do we guide traffic better without causing people to stop to figure it out?

The ROI for UX projects tends to come in at around 200%. That alone should be reason enough to create that position for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t be working in a vacuum. I don’t have an engineering background, so I’d need access to someone who could say, “That won’t work, but if we change this part it might.” Like working with developers on a web project, it takes multiple minds working as a team to get the project done.

I just want to make theme parks better. Not only because I want a job, but because I love theme parks but hate crowds. That’s my ultimate goal. To work at making play better.