Shaping the digital
experience of water theme park

Park of Poland is the largest tropical-themed water park in Poland and Europe, designed to accommodate 8000 people at once! It has 32 slides with a total length of over 3 km, the longest indoor slide in Europe - which is 320 meters long, four hundred palm trees, 840 m2 thermal pool, 20 000 m2 garden, various saunas, and SPA service. Flying Bisons have designed and developed websites and e-commerce platforms for Park of Poland.

Park of Poland is located in the heart of Poland. In Wrecza, Mszczonów commune, 60 km from Warsaw – between A2 motorway and S8 expressway.

Goal
To design and deliver the full digital presence of Park of Poland
Scope
Discovery, Strategy, UX, UI,
Front-end & Back-end development
Length
2 years

01
The Challenge
Designing and developing a platform for the water park
02
THE PROCESS
Co-operation with team building the real water park
03
THE RESULTS
Fully operational front-end & back-end e-shop

How it all started?

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Our long term partnership with Park of Poland started in 2017. Thanks to Mamastudio (www.mamastudio.com - responsible for the branding of Park of Poland), we were invited to present our offer for creating the landing page for a new investment that was starting near Warsaw. It turned out that this “investment” was a theme water park with a budget of 350 mln euro. At that point, we didn’t expect that our co-operation will go that far - we were a team of 8 and still in our first office on Chmielna Street - now at the end of 2019 we are a team of 40 UX, UI, Dev & Analytics professionals.

All we felt was excitement that we can be a part of such a huge project. Initial meeting with Park of Poland’s team went great and soon after a few weeks, we agreed to start preparing the first small website.

March 2016 Getting to know
each other

April 2017 First website

May 2018 We do digital!

January 2020 Start a new
e-commerce website

February 2020 Park opening

Everyone is interested!

FIRST WEBSITE

We designed and then developed the parkofpoland.com by the summer of 2018. The process of creating the website was nothing special in terms of UX - we gathered all necessary and available at that moment information, created the sitemap, and translated it into mockups.

The true challenge was preparing a visual style that will align with the branding. The biggest obstacle was the lack of visual content. We only had a logotype from Mamastudio, some 3D renders of slides and some technical materials. Our designers prepared the whole visual language for the park.

We were more than happy with the results! The website was doing what it was designed for - passing information about the Park of Poland and had “Wow effect”. The landing page had more than hundreds of thousands of users, unique users, over the 2018-19 period!

The sky is the limit!

NEXT STEPS

After the success with the first website, an opportunity appeared. It turned out that Park of Poland’s team was considering us as a company that might prepare the whole platform that will “run” the digital site of the operation: e-commerce, accommodation, wristband system and ticket system inside the park.

The team was ready - we already had a lot of experience with big projects: e-commerce for KFC, transactional system & PeoPay app for Pekao Bank, international projects with PwC, IKEA and Kompania Piwowarska (biggest brewery in Poland).

Full scope for Flying Bisons

The chance was huge! We could be responsible for the entire digital customer experience and co-create experience inside the THEME PARK - very unique opportunity, maybe one in a lifetime. That was it! We had to do everything to make it real. We started consulting the project with the Park of Poland team and had a number of meetings. There were a lot of topics to cover, a lot of decisions to be made and a lot of things were unknown. Proactively our team prepared a list of expected touchpoints and possible customer journey maps!

Our business and consulting approach was key. Building the map and proposing the journey in detail was a very important moment in our co-operation. We could even call it a milestone for the project and Flying Bisons. From that moment we gain enough trust to be a real contender for being a vendor!

Eventually, we got it! A project of this size means that we became long-term business partners with Park of Poland.

3, 2, 1 ... start!
We are going on a trip.

DISCOVERY PHASE

One of the biggest projects in the history of Flying Bisons started as usual with the discovery phase, but this time we took the term “understand the experience of the user” to the maximum. By invitation of PoP, we went together to visit Romania’s “Therme Bucharest” water park. During the time in the Bucharest, we were able to understand the touchpoints, spot some experience problems and areas to improve.

We came back to Poland with heads full of ideas and motivation! That trip gave us a lot of “pre-kickoff” information that we were able to utilize to prepare a better project process. Moreover, it was a great team-building exercise.

Preparing for
the big challenges!

DISCOVERY PHASE

Our team was in the center of the whole project, we had a product owner role. That meant we had to lead the process and drive it forward. The schedule was very tight and the deadline was short. The project started in late March 2019, and it had to be finished by the end of the year. It was unlike any other project because, without a fully operational website, the park could not be opened.

The process had to involve a lot of stakeholders and vendors: branding company, which was responsible also for visual signage inside the park; the company responsible for delivering the accommodation engine; the company responsible for ticket selling system and digital wristbands inside the park; company running the bungalows; Park of Poland’s team.

We divided the process into the discovery phase, strategy phase, concept phase, design & analytics phase, development phase, Q&A and security check. The foundation for the design part of the project was preparing a very detailed: List of all elements, modules, and functions; screens Inventory; user stories, timeline - during the discovery, strategy and concept phase. From our experience, we know that.

Discovery

Strategy

Concept

Design

Development

Optimization

Kicking the project off!

DISCOVERY PHASE

During the kickoff, our main goal was to create a common vision for the project, understand all of the business perspectives and create an initial roadmap for the project. The meeting started with a round of introduction, as all the stakeholders and vendors were present. Our team used the Business Model Canvas as a tool to gather information. It allowed us to bring up many important topics in a very structured way. After a few hours, we were able to put together the initial roadmap which was accepted by all stakeholders.

E-commerce for
everyone? Building
Proto-personas

DISCOVERY PHASE

Before moving into planning the solution we need more information about potential users and that is not so easy! The daily capacity of the park oscillates around 8000 [sic]. If we want to map all the possible personas we probably would need to map people of age and gender. We had a similar problem when we were redesigning NC+ self-care mojenc.pl (still in development) where there were too many personas to cover.

Esteban Morterero 23 years Student

Katarzyna Novitska 26 years Freelancer

Maciej Marcinkowski 36 years Enterpreneur

Sylwia Burczyk 20 years Student

Tomasz Ringwelski 48 years Doctor

Zuzanna Gawińska 67 years Pensioner

Dariusz Gorzynski 28 years Sportsman

Henryk Domagalski 42 years Invalid

For self-care, we decided to create jobs to be done personas, but here we decided to create personas that will most likely come to the park during weekdays. The reason why we decided to do so is connected with the business risks of the park which are: too many clients during weekends; too few during weekdays. We wanted to deeply understand potential “weekdays clients”.

Esteban Morterero 23 years Student

Katarzyna Novitska 26 years Freelancer

Maciej Marcinkowski 36 years Enterpreneur

Sylwia Burczyk 20 years Student

Tomasz Ringwelski 48 years Doctor

Zuzanna Gawińska 67 years Pensioner

Dariusz Gorzynski 28 years Sportsman

Henryk Domagalski 42 years Invalid

During proto-personas workshops we were mainly working with the Park of Poland’s marketing team, so it was also a great exercise for them, as at that moment they were preparing the whole marketing strategy for the park. The next thing, which was preparing the value proposition for each persona, was something that gave us a lot of important insights for specific areas of the planned website.

Mapping the park
experience

DISCOVERY PHASE

Once we understood in general what we need to create and for whom, it was the time to dive deeper into online and offline touchpoints. Together with PoP’s team, we started mapping the whole park experience. It’s basically essential if we don’t want to miss anything on a website.

During that process, it turned out that the website will need to be a little bit bigger in terms of a page number and we managed to even find some blindspots in offline park experience! The visit to Romania turned out to be priceless.

Since 2019 we started building an analytical team (at that moment 4 people) which is rapidly growing. For every project, we prepare a customized analytical plan ( read more), the outcome of which is a data layer that allows us to gather the most important information in Google Analytics.

After creating specific customer journeys for proto-personas we become aware that preparing an analytical plan for PoP will be quite a challenge. A lot of offline data points will need to match online data, and a lot of touchpoints are mixed!

Understanding
the technology

DISCOVERY PHASE

In order to understand all involved external systems and their possibilities, dependencies, limitations, etc. we have run several technology workshops with the client. We had to make sure that we know how each third party system operates and how we are able to integrate it with the online selling platform we were going to develop. At the end of the day, we had to integrate with 4 large independent external providers! This includes ticket/wristband management system, hotel reservation engine, spa & wellness booking system and payment provider!

Firstly, we have run workshops with each provider to make sure we understand their product top to bottom. This allowed us to establish workload on our side as well as minimize the project risk.

Secondly, we had workshops just with the client to establish their needs and craft workflow across the systems, which also meets their operation plan within the park. As a result, we created event diagrams for each action that should take place on the website platform and assign “actors” to every event. This also gave us a clear view of which stage of development we should include every 3rd party provider.

Last but not least, we ran requirements engineering workshops with stakeholders from different departments so we could clearly understand their operational needs and craft them into functional and non-functional requirements that the platform should fulfill. In the end, we had over 200 user stories!

Creating
actionable plan

DISCOVERY PHASE

The discovery phase gave us a precise understanding of what we need to build. Next step - prepare an actionable plan that will be aligned with the very tight and complicated process of building the real water park. Using customer journeys maps we were able to list all elements, modules, and functions needed. When we were finalizing the process with first “screen inventory” and user stories it turned out that the team will need to be pretty big: four designers, copywriter, project manager, and five developers were assigned to the PoP’s team.

The goals and rules
of the project

STRATEGY PHASE

While planning the strategy for bringing to life the new website for Park of Poland we discussed and agreed to some goals and rules:

Mobile-first

We expect around 70% of traffic to come from mobile in 2020.

Accessibility is a priority

We agreed that the website will have all needed accessibility features (will be introduced in March 2020)

Unique design

Because the Park is all about the experience, the user interface part of the project is crucial!

Photos presenting happy people

We agreed that pictures will present people enjoying their time inside the Park.

Copywriting

This is, as we always say, a vital part of user experience and we know that we need to prepare it internally.

Easy checkout

Great product is not enough. We knew that a smooth and simple checkout process is the key to have a high conversion rate.

SEO

Understanding the future marketing strategy is needed.

Security

No release on production without a security check.

Planning the
website and
e-commerce

CONCEPT PHASE

With concrete fundaments, the team was keen to start the concept phase. We decided to start with the plan for navigation - we went through all available benchmarks and prepared do&dont’s. The next step was in front of the board. Using stickers we prepared categorizations, grouped pages, and generally defined content of each page. Having that ready we were able to design a lo-fi concept for the navigation.

Sitemap

Going forward we needed to finalize a sitemap. We planned to create many similar modules across the whole website, so it will be much easy for the user to navigate. We also made a decision that the homepage will be the outcome of all the secondary pages and its sections. That’s why we started sitemap backward, with secondary pages. The main idea behind the sitemap was that user can seamlessly explore the attractions using PoP’s website, we wanted the user to be able to jump through different parts of the platform without thinking.

Having navigation and sitemap ready we were confident enough to start preparing a lo-fi design for main screens and checkout processes.

Homepage

USER EXPERIENCE

The sum of the most important pages and elements of the whole website.

Attractions

USER EXPERIENCE

No need to open new tabs - “expand” to read more.
Seamless experience during exploration of the website.

Ticket
configuration

USER EXPERIENCE

Many ways to get to the ticket buying process.
Pre-configuration step.
Define every single ticket separately.
Multiple options for the ticket (airplane tickets experience)
Upsells
Accommodation in the checkout process for the whole Suntago experience

FAQ

USER EXPERIENCE

Designed in a way that PoP can add unlimited content and questions

Footer

USER EXPERIENCE

All primary information and sitemap included
SEO purposes

It has to be tasteful

USER INTERFACE

From the very beginning of designing UI, we had clearly defined goals. We wanted to create an interface that conciliates the joyful topic with an orderly and simple arrangement of elements, easily readable for each of our personas. First, our team created a color set, combining juicy orange, with two shades of navy blue from the POP brand book and supplemented those colors with neutral grays. Of course, photos are the icing on the cake of this design. Colorful, vivid, reminiscent of the best tropical holidays.

MIDDLE RED PURPLE

HEX: 20183B

RGB: 32 / 24 / 59

RESOLUTION BLUE

HEX: 0C2487

RGB: 12 / 36 / 135

BLUE CRAYOLA

HEX: 2A7DFF

RGB: 42 / 125 / 255

CARROT ORANGE

HEX: F6931E

RGB: 246 / 147 / 30

SLATE GRAY

HEX: 6A718A

RGB: 106 / 113 / 138

BLUE BELL

HEX: 9BA2BF

RGB: 155 / 162 / 191

Design system

Style Guide was created simultaneously with the process of designing main screens. We knew that with a project on such a large scale, designing and aggregating all individual elements of the website would be a key to efficient work. 5 designers were working on the Park of Poland UI in full swing of project. We couldn't afford the clutter and chaos in files.

Icons are crucial

When the project was starting, we received some graphic materials from Mamastudio. That pack included among others a set of 20 icons that are going to appear on signage inside the park. Based on them, we designed over 40 more icons necessary for the UI project.

120+ desktop screens

Many original screens and even more states summed up to the significant number! Working with the design system was a massive advantage for our design team.

140+ mobile screens

Many original screens and even more states summed up to the significant number! Working with the design system was a massive advantage for our design team.

Data is the key
to growth

DATA GATHERING - ANALYTICAL PLAN

Once the Hi-Fi version of wireframes is accepted, it’s time for creating an analytical plan. Our analytical process is described here. It’s the first and necessary step for starting the CRO program. To create such a document, analytical team sits down with the design team and a client to discuss their future needs. The expectation was that Flying Bisons’ team and Park of Poland will be able to analyze digital data on a daily basis.

Over many projects, we discovered that the hardest thing in the implementation of an analytical plan is developing the data layer, especially when the product is developed by an external team. Luckily in our case, our internal dev team was responsible and they were able to cooperate with the analytical team on a daily basis.

The most challenging task from a data analytics perspective was to plan the data model to connect online (website) and offline (park experience). The next step is to start using the data and slowly increase automatization and personalization using the CRM.

Flying Bisons does their job carefully. They discussed our needs with us during a specific workshop. They prepared strategy, timing, and scope of work in advance, which was very important for us.

Ewa Wdowska

Marketing Director

Designing and developing a platform for the water park

Co-operation with team building the real water park

Fully operational front-end & back-end e-shop

Full scope for Flying Bisons