What do you do with the Crowd Calendar?

We are currently thinking about the design of our Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar. While talking to Len, I realized that we aren’t really to best ones to assess what folks are actually doing with the Crowd Calendar. For our purposes here, by Disney World Crowd Calendar, I mean everything on the page at Disney Crowd Calendar.

I know how I use it for my own trips, and we field questions and complaints (mostly about changes in crowd levels) with some regularly, but what do you all look at on the Crowd Calendar? And/or what would you like to do with it? And why?

As we look to the future of the Crowd Calendar, we want to pay attention to the features that are important to you all. Any feedback is welcome.

Thanks!

-David

I like how it currently is. Only info I don’t care about is the 1-day ticket price, everything else is useful to me. Only thing I guess could improve it (somewhat) would be to add some sort of color code to the crowd level number, maybe highlight best/worse park of the day, something like that.

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I like it the way it is, with no color-coding. I like to print it off and add my own colors, circles, stars, etc. Sometimes I want to highlight the best park for a given day. Other times I want to highlight the best day in our given trip dates to do a certain park. Any pencil notes get lost in colored backgrounds.

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Every piece of information on the crowd calendar currently is useful to me at times. I use the price per day and operating hours as a gut check of Disney’s expectation for crowds; AP blockout is especially useful for gauging DLR crowds; special events are important to know as well.

As far as the layout, I might suggest making it easier to see which park is in which column. If people don’t like color codes, maybe just repeating the title row more often and making the header font stand out more, or using formatting (like double borders) to mark off where the park columns start might make it easier to read at a glance.

Personally I would like a color code - it might be worth doing a poll to see what the average user thinks.

The way I use the crowd calendar typically is 1) compare potential weeks or times of year to pick my vacation for a time when the crowds are lower in general; 2) pick which park has the lowest crowd each day of my trip and try to allocate accordingly, according to priority.

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I wish the crowd calendar would reflect actual crowd levels instead of wait times.

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I look at park hours and showtimes for night shows. I use it a little bit to guide park choices on a given day. And I use the number to help me decide how stringently to plan, vs how much I can be a little more loose with my time.

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Agreed

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Interesting concept :wink:

I pretty much use all the info in the CC as it currently stands. The one thing I would like to see is some sort of history for the hours predictions - e.g. this is what we predicted for hours before WDW did its first announcement of park hours, and this is what the hours actually ended up being. This would be particularly useful for times where WDW changes the hours close to the date, like the holiday period, as I think that the predicted hours are probably closer to the final hours than the initially released hours.

I think that this makes sense, but I do spend way too much time thinking about park hours… :wink:

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Am I right that years ago each day on the app was color coded. I thought that was determined not to be the best way to represent the crowds. I struggle with this:

Honestly, I would prefer one color, like the “good old days”.

I actually find this easier to view:

With the overall number and hours.

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I really like the heat map by time of day. I had forgotten about that format since I hadn’t used it in a while. Is it possible to embed different views so users can choose how to see the data presented?

I use all the information at different stages of planning. I like black and white so I can print and mark it with color codes myself. The only thing I don’t like is the different parks are all the way at the top, wish it was at the top of each month.

We choose our week to visit by personal factors rather than crowd levels, tho if we have a choice, the week with the lowest crowd levels is the one we’ll choose.

Crowd calendars are very good for wishful thinking. Like when post retirement trips could happen.

I like the colored calendars. Green is go.

Definitely use the crowd calendar to pick park days. Day 1- MK is only park with a 1 so that’s where we’re going. Day 2- AK is a 1 and that’s the park for that day. And so on.

I don’t use the how we did today feature.

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I wish they included parties. We’re trying to decide which days to do the Christmas parties, and the crowd tracker doesn’t really help.

For example, the Christmas party post from last year on the blog (2019 predictions haven’t been posted yet) would have us believe that 12/15 (Sunday) will be less crowded compared to 12/19 (Thursday). The ticket prices are higher for Thursday, so it could very well may be true. But the crowd calendars during the day (we stay morning to close) would seem to indicate that Thursday is less crowded; Sunday has a pre party CL of 5 vs Thursday of 3. I know daytime crowds aren’t directly linked to party crowds, but it seems like there would be a general correlation.

It would be less confusing if the optional parties were included with a separate crowd level. Though maybe that’d be really difficult to do, considering how Disney seems to keep increasing the number of party tickets each year.