The Walt Disney World website cuts its top menu to four categories and adds tabbed restaurant menus
DisneyWorld.com has rolled out a redesign. The top navigation bar is down to four categories, Parks, Tickets and Passes, Places to Stay and Dining, with a translucent frosted finish, and restaurant menu pages now use tabs to switch between meal periods. Disney has not said whether the app is next.
The Walt Disney World website has a new look. The top navigation bar has been cut down to a short list of core categories with a translucent, frosted finish, and restaurant menu pages now use a tabbed layout that separates lunch from dinner instead of stacking both on one long page.
The Buzz
DisneyWorld.com is the first stop for almost every Walt Disney World trip, and its navigation has grown steadily more crowded for years. Cutting it to a handful of top-level categories is the kind of change guests notice immediately, and the restaurant menu tabs fix a specific annoyance for anyone comparing meal periods before booking. What is not yet clear is whether the same treatment is coming to the My Disney Experience app.
Key details
- What changed: the top navigation bar, plus some individual content pages including restaurant menus
- New top-level menu: Parks, Tickets and Passes, Places to Stay, Dining
- Visual treatment: a translucent, frosted nav bar in the style of Apple's Liquid Glass design language
- Restaurant pages: simplified list format with tabs to switch between meal periods
- Not addressed: Disney has not said whether more sections will follow, or what happens to the mobile app
Four categories where there used to be a long list
The old navigation bar carried a long run of links across the top. The replacement trims it to four core categories: Parks, Tickets and Passes, Places to Stay, and Dining. The bar itself now has a translucent, frosted appearance, similar to the Liquid Glass style Apple introduced on iOS and macOS.
Opening the Parks menu produces a dropdown with the park pages, things to do, and links across to Disney Springs and merchandise. Folding Disney Springs and shopping into a Parks dropdown is a defensible call, since neither is a park but both are places guests go, and it keeps the top row short.
Restaurant menus got tabs
The redesign is not confined to the homepage. Restaurant menu pages have moved to a simplified list format with a tab system, so a guest can switch between meal periods such as lunch and dinner without leaving the page or scrolling past one menu to reach the other.
That is a small change with an outsized effect on trip planning. Walt Disney World table service restaurants frequently run different prices and different signature dishes across meal periods, and the previous single-page layout made comparing them a scrolling exercise. Dining reservations open 60 days out for resort guests, so this is a page a lot of people are reading under time pressure.
What is still unknown
Disney has not commented on how far the redesign goes. There is no statement on whether other site sections will get the same treatment, and no indication of what it means for the My Disney Experience mobile app, which shares much of the same content but none of this navigation. The site is live now at disneyworld.disney.go.com, so the fastest way to see what changed is to open it.
