Review: Disneyland CA Planner

Overview

Disneyland CA Planner is an unfinished version of a must have application for visitors to the magic kingdom in California. It's a very busy app trying to do a lot of things to make your visit to Disneyland easier, including marking where you parked, allowing you to make a list of attractions you want to visit, providing a pretty decent interactive map of the park and lots more. The app could use a lot of polish and only serves half the Disneyland resort, skipping California Adventure entirely, but it delivers lots of great information and is useful for anyone spending a day in the magic kingdom. It's just not as useful as it could be. By version 2.0 or 3.0, Disneyland CA Planner will be a must have app.

Features

Virtually every feature you would want to find in a Disneyland app is here, you just may not find the features very useable in the current version. The best example of this is the marquee feature - ride wait times. Users can enter the time you waited for an attraction when you check it off of your to-visit list. This information is shared with everyone else who uses the app. You can even add alerts when the wait time for a ride drops below a certain length. It's an absolute killer feature with a major caveat. Not many people are using it, so the feature is effectively useless. GotPlanS would be well served releasing a free version of their app just for wait times. People could enter, and see, the wait times for Disneyland attractions for free. For GotPlanS, it would function like a lite version of the app tempting people to pony up for the feature-rich Disneyland CA Planner. For users, it would extend the user base enough so wait times could actually become a useful feature. As it stands now, there just aren't very many people using the app to provide a decent number of wait times. I spotted iPhone users everywhere during my family's three day vacation at Disneyland last week. Unfortunately, when I went to the app, only a couple attractions had wait times reported. While one feature shows potential, another feature is instantly useful the moment you get to the park. Tapping on i-Parked, you can specify the building, level and section where you parked the car in Disney's massive parking structure. I used this every day I visited and it turned out to be a much simpler solution than writing it down, sticking it in a note or, God forbid, actually trying to remember it. It's important to note high up in this review the absence of California Adventure, the second Disney park in California, from this app. While many people get park hopper tickets or are annual passholders who visit both parks, this app cannot help them when they enter the other park. I hope to see California Adventure, or the restaurants of Downtown Disney, included in a later version of this app and not released separately (read the developer's response for more on that). Next up is the to-visit list, which lets you specify rides you want to go on and see their wait times. Again, a super useful feature and the one that will keep you coming back to the app again and again throughout the day. Also, there's the map. The first screen you're greeted with upon opening this app is an interactive map with GPS that does a great job of replacing the paper maps available throughout the park. It's customizable and marks the locations of all the rides, ATMs, bathrooms and shops. There are a ton of smaller features in this app, but rather than just listing them off, I've included a screenshot of the app's description.

The Breakdown

The Good

The app has a ton of features and your mileage will vary depending on what kind of a visit you want to have. The needs of an annual passholder differ hugely from a person who has planned a once a year family excursion. I had a three day trip, so our family could take our time. Because we visited both parks on multiple days, the to-visit list was pretty useless to us as we had to consider all the rides in California Adventure when we were planning and there was no rush to do it. For someone on a one day trip though, it would be far more important to plan your day carefully to make sure you hit all the important rides. For them, the to-visit list become extremely useful for making sure you stay on task.

The Bad

While I love the concept and massive feature list of this app, I just couldn't imagine anyone using it for an extended period of time in real life situations because the app isn't intuitive and the most impressive feature on the app is currently useless. A good example of how Disneyland CA Planner isn't intuitive is on the i-Parked screen. You use sliders to pick the level, section and aisle where you parked and then hit save at the bottom. However, the screen doesn't give you any feedback that it has actually been saved and you can still move the sliders. It's one of those basic software design things that is necessary for people to understand what's going on. Sure, it still works, but it slowed me down. There are examples of little things like that all throughout this app. It just isn't as intuitive as it should be. The app needs a lot of polish too, which means better looking icons and more clearly defined buttons. I noticed Goofy was spelled Goofey on one of the pages. It's just little things like that slow you down, which is a very bad thing when you're jaunting around a theme park. I just can't stress enough how big of a bummer it is that this app doesn't have California Adventure and the wait times aren't yet helpful. There also currently isn't a location check on wait times, so someone could potentially submit an inaccurate ride time from anywhere.

Developer Response

I contacted GotPlanS to see what their plans are for adding California Adventure. Scott from GotPlanS responded to me via e-mail. "We are considering the addition of California Adventure, although it may need to be a separate app," he wrote. Scott also said there will be several improvements coming. Among them will be a GPS check so that only people within the park can submit a wait time. There will also be the ability to report unreliable wait times. The resolution of the map and icons will also improve (they look pixelated when you zoom in too far). They also plan to add a chat feature to talk to other people inside the park as well as a locker number and code recorder.

Conclusion

I recommend buying this app if you're making a trip to Disneyland with the caution that it still needs a lot of work and you should feel your way around with it before getting into the park. Despite all my complaints, it still provides lots of utility. Remember, California Adventure is not included and wait times are available on very few rides.

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