Making a splash online

for Europe's largest

tropical-themed water park.

The project started in late March 2019, and it absolutely had to be completed by the end of the year. The water park could not open without a fully functioning website, since so many of the offline systems depended on the digital platform. So there really was no room for delay.

As always, the project kicked off with an in-depth discovery phase. But this time we took the concept of 'discovery' to a whole new level. At PoP's invitation, we travelled to Romania to visit the amazing Therme Bucharest water park.

During our time in Bucharest, we gained first-hand experience of how a large-scale water park works, and identified a number of customer experience challenges and opportunities. We returned to Poland with motivation high and our heads swimming with ideas.

From here, the process involved collaborating with a range of different stakeholders and vendors. There was the branding studio, who were also responsible for visual signage inside the park. The company in charge of delivering the accommodation engine. The people managing the ticketing and wristband systems. The bungalow operators. And, of course, the PoP team itself.

After agreeing a common vision for the project, we set about creating an initial roadmap. Our team used the business model canvas framework to gather information and cover important topics in a highly structured way. Within a few hours, the initial roadmap was finalised and accepted by everyone involved.

We decided to create proto-personas based on people likely to visit the park on weekdays. The park's main business risk is having too many customers on weekends and too few on weekdays. So gaining a deeper understanding of the needs and challenges of potential 'weekday clients' could only be beneficial.

For the proto-persona workshops – and later in creating the fully-formed personas – we mainly worked with PoP's marketing team. It was a great exercise for them, as they were in the middle of preparing the full marketing strategy for the whole park at that time. Similarly, preparing value propositions for each proto-persona was a valuable experience for us, as it gave us a lot of useful insight into specific areas of the new website.

Next, it was time to dive deeper into the online and offline touchpoints. Together with PoP's team, we started mapping the whole park experience – an essential exercise, as it ensured nothing was left to chance or missed along the way. During this process, we realised the website would need more pages than we'd initially planned. We also managed to identify some blindspots in the real-life park experience, which probably wouldn't have been possible without that invaluable trip to Romania.

The new platform would need to integrate with four large, independent external systems:

• Ticket/wristband management

• Hotel reservations

• Spa and wellness bookings

• Payment provider

To understand these systems – their possibilities, dependencies and limitations – we ran technology workshops with each provider. This helped us get to know their products from top to bottom, and allowed us to gauge the workload on our side while minimising the project risk.

We then held sessions with the client to establish their needs and create workflows across the systems, in harmony with their operational plan for the park. From there, we created event diagrams for each action that should take place on the platform and assigned 'actors' to every event.

Finally, we held requirements engineering workshops with stakeholders from various departments. This helped us gain a better understanding of their operational needs, and allowed us to craft them into functional and non-functional requirements for the platform to fulfil. By the end of the exercise, we had over 200 user stories to work with.

By now, we had a clear and precise understanding of what we needed to build. The next step, then, was to prepare an actionable plan that would work alongside the complex and time-sensitive process of building the water park itself.

With the foundations firmly in place, our team was ready to get stuck into the concept phase. We started with the plan for the navigation, running through all the available benchmarks and preparing a set of dos and don’ts.

The next step was to go old-school and get up in front of the whiteboard. Using stickers, we prepared categorisations, grouped pages, and defined the general content of each page. With all of this in place, we were able to design a lo-fi concept for the navigation.

Up next: finalising the sitemap. We planned to create several similar modules across the website, to make it easier for the user to navigate.

The main idea behind the sitemap was to help users seamlessly explore PoP’s attractions through the website. We wanted users to be able to hop between different parts of the platform without having to think too much.

Once we had the navigation and sitemap nailed down, we were ready to start preparing a lo-fi design for the main screens and checkout processes.

Our UI design goals were clear from the start. We wanted to create an interface that captures the fun subject of the website, while arranging elements in a simple, organised way that makes life as easy as possible for our target personas.

Our team created a colour set that combines juicy orange with two shades of navy blue from the PoP brand book, supplemented by neutral greys. The combination works brilliantly with the website's imagery, which is vibrant and colourful, and captures the exotic vibe of a tropical holiday.