Mike Atherson gave an extremely touching and inspiring presentation about the Imagineers of Disney, and the amount of love that goes into their work. It was enlightening to hear the story on how much detail went into generating the experience that a visitor has when visiting one of Disney theme parks. The following are my tweets from the session:
What is love? Would you sacrifice your children for an iPod touch, but never touch a MS Zune.
Emotional Engagement helps drive the design process.
That one with the damn song! Talking about the worse ride at Disney World ‘It’s a Small World’ (Talking about ‘It’s a Small World.’ I am NOT a fan of that ride at all.)
Disneyland was a hard sale, it was the first theme park. It’s user experience made it different than the standard coney island.
It doesn’t matter how since your specs or wireframes are, the client always gets excited over the pretty pictures.
Showing off the pretty pictures get the people involved emotionally engaged in the project.
The trick is to have a cross functional team where everyone brings something special to the table.
Learn from each other, team members can share their knowledge with the rest of the team and learn from them.
Anyone with a dream can come up with an idea and pitch it to people.
The rides at Disney are Architectural Story Telling. It gets the people taking the ride engaged in the experience.
The designs we create should be lead by the stories we want to tell.
The simple act of walking into Disney and the sights presented to you were engineered to remove you from reality.
Walt Disney wasn’t driven by money, but a level of quality. It gave him the freedom to do wonders
http://twecipe.com/ took 3 days and 300 dollars to create. Don’t be afraid to innovate, it may be cheaper than you think.
‘Websites that took the world by storm weren’t created by agencies or someone working with a client.’
Flickr started out as a massive online game, at some point they stopped and focused on sharing images. The rest is history.
The lesson learned from this session is to really care about whatever it is you create. By having an emotional connection to your product or service, it drives you to ensure a design is of high quality and provides the best experience for your users or customers. Don’t let nay-sayers and critics stop you from pursuing your dream and possibly taking the world by storm.
Creating Magic Kingdoms – 9 Lessons from Disney’s Imagineers
View more presentations from Mike Atherton.