Smart Ocean Park: Redefining Seamless Park Experience

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

SG Mark is organised by Design Business Chamber Singapore (DBCS), and it delivers a strong message on how design make impact on business growth. 

Receiving SG Mark has helped endorsed CaaS brand as design service quality, and design is not just a beautiful face on top of the service, but deeply integrated with service quality.

2. How do you think your design has impacted users?

• Understand park info / plan / buy / app wallet
• Recommended itineraries are designed to helped organisers of the trip to plan ahead for various needs of friends and family (e.g. family with young kid, teenagers, elders)
• For certain rides or entertainment, age, height and physical fitness might be required. We have prompted those information ahead of time to avoid disappoint to the attraction
• Users with time constraints need to get around efficiently for more attractions

Parents need to plan and re-plan spontaneously base on nap time or any other children’s need. Dealing with surprises, e.g. queue is 2-hours long upon arrival

3.  What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

The most difficult moment was understand the park guest needs (Empathy for guest / customers ) and translate into design is always challenging.  We have carefully crafted the project plan to ensure the goal can be accomplished:

– Interviewed Ocean Park guests on their trip planning and in-park and
after trip experience ( Before, during and after experience)

– Shadowed various groups of guest to understand their needs, queries
and inconvenient moment when they are visiting the park. Our
researchers spent 2 – 4 hours under sun or rain with each group of the
guest in order to get the essence of their experience.

– We have invited Ocean Park staff members (clients from various
department and level) to come work as one team to participate in
some of the guest interviews , to ensure cross team participate in
the Empathy process.

– A core team is formed to help manage and facilitate the whole design
process to keep cross department in the loop in the digital
transformation of Smart Park experience.

4. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

• Ourselves: Empathy Research and service design as part is one of the key elements that helps drive the success of the Digital Design for this project with cross team.  When we first approaching the client with full Design Thinking approach, we were not sure if we can get the senior Directors buy in.  We are happy with the collaboration with Ocean Park in the process.
  
• Guests:  Enjoying good times with friends and family at Ocean Park is the prime of the experience. We carefully design the digital experience to assist the guest to navigate around and provide assistance and it is not the prime itself

4. What are your future plans?

CaaS continues to believe user research and service design are fundamental elements that helps drive the success of the Digital Design.  We will continue to focus on supporting clients in building digital strategies, and provide learning programs to help our clients training their team to deliver exemplify digital experience.

5.  What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

Users need is always the key for design. We cannot stop advocating the importance of looking into both qualitative and quantitative data for digital design. At early stage, we have identified the design should not be measured purely digital about download right, but how well it assist the guests to understand the park experience, plan and assist them to navigate for the best experience as our goal.

6. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

Truly integrating the digital experience with Park traveling experience is indeed more complicates than a merely digital business.  Technical challenges with other technical partners occurs and some of the original ideas may not be able to be triaged to future versions.

7. How do you unwind after the grind?

Although we love theme parks, our researcher may want to take a short break before going back to visit again after touring with guest every day for a month.