Disney
Improved Dining Reservation Tools
Starting September 2024, I became the Senior Product Designer in charge of designing 13+ features aiming to improve the online dining reservation process at Walt Disney World and Disneyland restaurants. The features launched on both web and app in June 2025 to strong positive reception that made it much easier for park guests to book and manage their dining reservations.
MY ROLE
Product/UX design, research
DURATION
September 2024 – June 2025
Background
For a long time, more than 180 restaurants across Disney’s US parks and their diners faced a cumbersome experience booking and managing their reservations. Guests would run into a poor search experience and unclear placements of otherwise valuable functionality and info. So, a concerted effort began in 2022 to modernize the legacy systems and remedy these pain points.
In 2023, a first wave of improvements launched that addressed many but not all of guest frustrations. Its success and room for iteration led to a second wave of enhancements for me to design when I joined Disney in 2024.
Understanding the previous experience
I was tasked with not only introducing new features, but also revisiting old ones. Some of these new and revisited features include:
Filter restaurant search results by location
View reservation availability across multiple days
More transparency into a specific day’s availability
When I started, I spent extensive time going through both Walt Disney World and Disneyland’s dining reservation flows on both app and web. I cultivated my understanding behind the purposes of the enhancement effort as well as the nuances of how park guests use the apps and websites differently.
Restaurant search results on mobile and desktop (2023–2025)
Clunky UI and lack of transparency around availability resulted in guests frequently running into dead-ends.
Creating possible solutions
Collaborating with product and development
My process involved close collaboration with my product and development partners. By reviewing requirements, past and current data on guests’ dining behavior, and development constraints, my ideas followed a strong holistic approach.
Contact me for a detailed overview of this step in my design process.
Gathering inspiration
Other competitors in the dining reservation space like OpenTable, Tock and Seated were used as inspiration, particularly with how they visualized different kinds of dining experiences. Additionally, I consulted availability displays on airlines like Alaska Airlines to get insight on how to display dense information across multiple columns of data.
Annotated screenshots of booking flights on Alaska Airlines (left), and restaurant availability for Seated ( middle) and Tock (right)
Flows, wireframes, and lo-fi mocks
The first artifacts I designed were flows to help map the entire experience of each feature. These artifacts would be regularly reviewed with my product team to make sure my designs had a strong foundation.
Evaluating solutions
For particularly complex features such as multi-day availability, I tested possible solutions via UserTesting.com. This research tested prototypes I designed reflecting both Walt Disney World and Disneyland scenarios and helped inform direction of the experience. In the example of multi-day availability, user feedback helped decide on one of two possible directions, which ultimately became the tabbed design seen today.
Concept A prototype showing date availability per restaurant
Concept B prototype showing date availability through tabs
Handoff process
After designs were thoroughly evaluated with a combination of actual guests and my product team, I’d create handoff materials. Documentation was created for each feature and its level of detail varied based on technical complexity.
Design system
Disney Experiences already had a growing, versatile design system in place when I worked on this project, which made building designs more efficient.
This system was used for more than just Food & Beverage experiences, but also in other divisions such as Cruise Lines and Lodging. However, the design system didn’t have every single component spec-ed out as needed, which involved some custom component design on my part.
Documentation
Handing off designs to my development team relied both on manual documentation and Figma Dev Mode for computed properties.
Final designs
Restaurants can finally be filtered by park and nearby resorts where applicable within Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
Calendars for individual restaurants now display which days do and don’t have reservations available.
Guests can now search up to 10 days of reservation availability across all restaurants, better accommodating for the average multi-day trip planning.
Additional features have been introduced such as visibility into upcoming reservations and dining periods offering experiences with iconic Disney characters.
Launch and lessons learned
The first release of features launched June 2025 to strong positive reception from park guests and internal metrics reported more efficient booking behavior. Insights from the launch are informing further iterations I’m designing for the dining reservation space.
For more details, please reach out.
Disney Creative Services collaborated with me and my product team to create this promotional video for Disney Parks Blog.