Case Study - UI/UX Design · Figma · Prototyping
Theme park apps are built for insiders. Disney and Universal's official apps reward guests who've done weeks of homework, learning which Lightning Lane type applies to which ride, which dining reservation system requires a credit card, what "VQ" means, and which parks require park-to-park tickets for specific lands.
For first-timers and irregular visitors, the actual majority of guests, these apps are anxiety machines. They're designed around the assumption that you already know what you're doing.
Screen Park is built for everyone else.
"The parks are supposed to be fun. We handle the rest."
Target User: Families visiting every 1 to 2 years. Overwhelmed by complexity, underwhelmed by what the official apps actually explain. They want a great day, not a certification course.
My Disney Experience (MDE). Powerful but overwhelming. Feature-dense with a learning curve. Terms like "Lightning Lane Multi Pass" vs "Individual Lightning Lane" require explanation Disney doesn't provide in-app. Good for power users. Bad for first-timers.
Universal Official App. Cleaner than MDE but still park-first, not guest-first. Map and wait times are solid. Intel is sparse. No community layer, no insider tips, no "what does this actually mean" explanations.
Ride Ready and third-party apps. Closer to the right idea but cluttered, ad-supported, and designed around data density rather than an actual guest journey.
"Every app I studied was built for the person who already knows. Nobody built for the person who doesn't."
The gap wasn't information. Both official apps have plenty of information. The gap was translation, converting park complexity into a plain-language, guided experience that anyone could pick up and use in the first 60 seconds.
Before a single screen was designed, the design system was built. Color palette, typography scale, icon language, component library, all locked, all documented, all componentized with variants before any screen touched them.
Screen Park needed a mark that could survive being shrunk to a 48 pixel app icon and still communicate the concept instantly. I sketched the first version on a sticky note during the Figma course, imagining a roller coaster crest anchored to a pin. The course covered vector drawing and shape tools around the same time, so I applied those lessons directly to bringing the sketch to life.
Final lockup, dark mode variant
Every major UX decision in Screen Park has a documented rationale. These aren't aesthetic choices - they're answers to real problems observed in competing apps.
Five tabs. Each one a distinct, complete experience. The architecture is designed so guests can navigate entirely by context - where they are, what they need, when they need it.
Screen Park is designed as a multi-resort platform. The Universal Orlando and Walt Disney World variants share identical information architecture, navigation logic, and interaction patterns. Only the color language and content adapt.
This symmetry is the point. Once a guest learns a feature in one park, they own it everywhere. That shared muscle memory matters most when it counts, heads down in thick crowds, kids tugging on a sleeve, two minutes to decide the next move. Confident navigation translates directly into faster decisions, fewer missed reservations, and more time actually in the experience.
Started the Figma course April 9. Cert in hand April 14. True prototype build started April 17. Four days later this existed. The eleven days matter because they show the ramp -- the four days matter because they show what happens when the ramp is done.
A selection of screens from the Universal and Disney flows. Each screen was designed to component spec and updated with the final icon and nav component library.
This project taught me more about design systems than any tutorial could. The constraint of building a second variant (Disney) after completing the first (Universal) forced every decision I made in the design system to be defensible. If a component couldn't adapt to a different color language while keeping the same structure, it wasn't actually a system - it was a one-off.
I went to Universal's parks mid-build specifically to stress-test the UX assumptions in the app against real guest behavior. Watching how actual families navigate the parks - the moments of confusion, the missed turns, the time spent looking at phones instead of the experience - confirmed every design decision I'd made and surfaced a few I hadn't thought of.
The anti-gatekeeping model is the one I'm most proud of. Theme park expertise shouldn't be a class system. The Butterbeer foam hack, the best photo spot at golden hour, the single rider line on Hagrid's that nobody advertises, the child swap program that lets parents with young kids take turns on thrill rides without re-queueing, these are the things that make the difference between a stressful day and a great one. Screen Park exists to equalize that.
For seven years at SOPO I designed in Adobe XD, the tool the company paid for and standardized on. When our developers recommended moving to Figma, I advocated for the switch. Leadership chose to stay on XD, so I kept shipping on XD, biweekly updates across five platforms for 25+ full redesigns. The work speaks for itself.
The industry, understandably, has moved on. Figma is the current standard, and matching the standard is table stakes. So I closed the gap. Eleven days to get fluent, four days to build something that shows what I can do with it. Screen Park isn't my proof that I can design, my portfolio already does that. It's my proof that when the tooling shifts, I shift with it fast, and I raise the bar on myself in the process.