Overview

MyDisneyToday (MDT) thrives on business collaboration. In the early months following launch, our product team took the lead on business configurations and updates through the ServiceNow ("native") portal. This native experience was incredibly unintuitive and required a consistent learning curve. Because of its complexity, it also meant only a few people knew how to use it and reliance on their expertise was eating away their time. Since the initial launch focused on delivering the MVP, the Business Admin Console quickly followed as a key next step. It gave us the opportunity to showcase the customization we could implement in-product while also introducing a user-friendly interface to support 240,000 employees world-wide. What follows is an overview of that console and how it supports MDT's scalability.

🎬 View Prototype

Without the Admin Console

The biggest struggles we faced without an admin console were:

• Dependency on experienced users - Only a few experts (me, my manager, and one analyst) managed business configurations and updates instead of focusing on their core work.
• Lack of self-service tools for business users - This customization was the first step in displaying how MDT could evolve into a CMS for our business partners to empower them instead of creating dependency on the product team (us).
• Time diverted from product priorities - Supporting configuration needs pulled time and focus away from critical product development tasks.
• Increased accuracy - The native console made it too easy to make mistakes or unintended releases due to its lack of usability.

Opportunities

This introduced a series of opportunities that drove our admin tool experience:

• Reduce product team overhead - Shifting configuration to a seamless and simple experience, frees up the product team to focus on core innovation.
• Accelerate content deployment - Editing, previewing, and updating could be done in a few easy steps rather than tackling the data-driven native console.
• Introduce scalable self-service - This could signify to business and leadershuo that self-service could be launched in MDT to reduce operational friction and scale better with growing business needs.
• Invest in purpose-built admin tools - Building dedicated tooling supports long-term efficiency and reduces reliance on workaround platforms.

Research & Discovery

Business Needs

Because MyDisneyToday delivers a tailored experience for employees across various businesses and regions, it was essential to provide flexibility to curate content. This included the ability to customize navigation and homepage widgets to better serve the needs of specific employee groups.

• Abiltiy to easily reach multiple BECs - A seamless approach to hopping between BECs.
• Single-page editing - We didn't want to jump around too much and create and overly-complex sitemap.
• Visual previews - Introduce ability to see changes while making edits instead of the current state of pushing edits in the dark.
• Templatization - Some BECs use many of the same resources. We needed a way to easily add generalized settings to a BEC instead of duplicative efforts.

Proposed Workflow

Without careful design, this admin tool risked becoming a tangled maze of links, tabs, and pages that could easily overwhelm users. To prevent this, I developed a streamlined portal workflow that offers an intuitive, straightforward way to access specific content quickly and publish updates seamlessly.

Creating the Experience

Our MDT product team includes third-party developers, and I collaborated closely with them to transform the native ServiceNow experience into a user-friendly platform that requires minimal training. These implementations were thoughtfully designed and developed to encourage seamless business collaboration.

List Views

Upon entering the admin console, the first page presents a list of business entity configurations. While this term originates from legacy development, it essentially refers to the unique business experience associated with each target.

🎬 List View Prototypes:
BECs | Top Navigation | Left Navigation | Navigation Links | Footers

Iterating BECs

The BEC-level hierarchy underwent numerous iterations to balance its complexity with usability. My goal was to keep the design as simple as possible while delivering the most efficient and effective layout.

Editing a BEC

Once an admin is inside a business configuration, they can edit various aspects of the portal - the top navigation, left navigation, footer, and homepage cards, or widgets, to include resources, events and news.

🎬 Editing a BEC

Homepage Cards

MyDisneyToday features a dynamic homepage where employees can customize widgets to create a workspace tailored to their needs. These widgets include business-specific content like Featured News, Upcoming Events, and Resources, alongside others that don’t require business input, such as Disney Stock, Learning & Development, Clubs & Groups, and Employee Recognitions.

🎬 Homepage Cards Configuration

Requirements

• Default Cards - Businesses are able to establish the initial layout of their homepage, before an employee moves, adds, or removes widgets.
• Default Reources - Like cards, default resources are set by businesses to establish a productive start to an employee's first visit to MDT - an attempt to give them what they need prior to customization.
• Upcoming Events Card - The Events card was targeted per business and region. Employees would only see events they can attend.
• Featured News - Each business had one or more news feeds. On the Featured News card for each business, their would be default feeds. This typically included the business or regional feed plus some enterprise subscriptions like Disney Today and Corporate Socialability. Employees could then unsubscribe to default feeds or subscribe to new feeds themsevles.
• Important Information - Also targeted per location, region, and business, the important information card came to be through COVID as news had to be promoted and "pinned" to employee bulletins such as vaccine information and workplace flexibility guidelines.

Top Navigation

Top navigation was one of the few places businesses could brand MyDisneyToday. To uphold accessibility compliance, we didn't allow for too much color customization. Top navs could be given background colors and text colors. This went through our approval to maintain an accessible contract on the navigation bar.

🎬 Editing Top Navigation

Requirements

• Logo - Editable, but remained the "MyDisneyToday" logo, only changed for the year of Disney's 100th anniversary in 2023.
• Text color - After implementation of the MyDisney design system and dark mode, this option became a dropdown of only curated colors.
• Background color - Businesses updated this to stamp their brand onto MyDisneyToday
• Preview - The lack of real-time visibility in the native console was frustrating. When designing the front-end console, it was essential to include a feature that allows admins to see their work as they progress.

Left Navigation

The left navigation panel offered limited customization. We provided businesses with a section of navigation to make their own. Links that did not change were those such as News, Events, Resources, My Account, and Help.

🎬 Left Navigation Prototypes:
Left Nav | Menu | Sub Links

Requirements

• Main menus - The highest level were the main menus that expanded to offer additional links.
• Multi-level link management - The left navigation had a hierarchy of Nav Panel > Main Menu > Sub-links. It was important to know what was being edited and to design that flow thoughtfully.
• Link information - After organizaing the main menus, links required fields to define the link names, URLs, icons, and targeting.

Footer

The footer rarely changed. Unless businesses were added, removed, or renamed, the footer was essentially set from launch. However, we needed a way to make adjustments as needed.

🎬 Editing the Footer

Requirements

• Logo - This remained the MyDisneyToday logo.
• Background color - Set to the $footer variable to adjust for light and dark modes.
• Text description - Legality text that was only updated per legal guidance.
• Links - Linked to the privacy policy and each business' content page (different than homepage, click the link at the bottom of this page!)

In Conclusion

The Business Entity Admin Tool was a game-changer for MDT, revolutionizing the platform from a static system into a powerful, flexible ecosystem. By empowering business users with intuitive, low-code customization capabilities, it drastically reduced dependency on specialized experts and accelerated content deployment—delivering measurable efficiency gains. This project not only streamlined operations but also proved instrumental in driving MDT’s scalability and adaptability, solidifying its role as a critical foundation for future innovation and sustained growth across the organization.