Great Wolf Lodge Mobile App

Great Wolf is a chain of indoor water park resorts with over eighteen locations across the US and Canada. Over the course of 5 months, we engaged with the Great Wolf team to lead the discovery, design, and development of a guest-facing mobile experience. Family vacations can be stressful - our goal was to ensure that the families visiting made the most of their stay with the ease of use of a best-in-class mobile app. 

Lean Requirements

So where do you start when you’re building the first app for a hospitality company?We started with defining a product canvas which then lead to a brainstorming session for features. From there, we were able to prioritize features based on the defined business problem and vision.

We decided to focus on:
Food, Maps, Concierge, Activities and Profile

Seeing is believing

Presented with five key areas of focus, we performed on-site research and remote testing across Great Wolf locations

• Wisconsin Dells, WI

• Anaheim, CA

• Minneapolis, MN

During the Anaheim and Minneapolis visits, we tested an Invision prototype with various employees at the lodge - ranging from General Manager to Housekeeping. This was an opportunity to serve not only the guests but also the folks who serve the guests. After every visit, we refined the prototype and added improvements to the build.

Service Design opportunities

How can we leverage existing phone capabilities to alleviate the check-in experience? Seems obvious, right? But documenting the flow and identifying areas, where the app would use native functionality, was important to ensure we were building the thing right. 

Usability Testing

45-60 minutes sessions, held remotely with participants who had visited the lodge at least once. We spoke to 10 former guests and had them walk through a prototype. This was a good exercise to validate the features and provide improvements to the information displayed. 

Stabilizing the app

After several releases of the first version of the app, users were not happy. It was difficult to check in, hard to understand why the check-in process wasn’t working and food ordering wasn’t always available. After a second workshop for new features, we chose to pause on that initiative and focus on truly servicing the guests of the lodge.

Added Transparency

Depending on the time of day and the weekend, there might be a huge queue of guests trying to check in. Unfortunately, that meant that rooms weren’t ready. The first version of the app never informed the user on what was going on behind the scenes and that lead to frustration.

Working closely with the Room Alerts team at Great Wolf, along with our engineering lead, we were able to surface 4 key steps in the room ready process. 

Surprise and Delight

Based on user feedback, it was also important to highlight whether or not a restaurant was available for mobile food ordering. Events would go by without a guest being notified. Through more robust notifications and hours of operations, we improved the user experience on both the Food and Activities side of the app.

Additionally, we added an Augmented Reality feature! The mobile app is built on ReactNative. We leveraged a platform called ViroReact to integrate with our application. The team at Great Wolf were not experts in 3D rendering so I stepped up and did recruiting and hired a contractor to create Wiley the Wolf into a living, breathing…filter. Functioning as an art director/project manager, I provided direction and set the timeline for the contracted designer.