Sydney Airport asked Praxis to reimagine the ‘couch-to-runway’ customer experience through a responsive website. Sydney Airport is Australia's leading airport and is a major destination for APAC travelers. It was critical that the designs be accessible to anyone in any location at any time. The designs needed to deliver a dynamic and individually tailored experience.
COMPANY: Praxis International
CLIENT: Sydney Airport
DURATION: 1 Year
MY ROLE: User Research, UX, Visual Design
Our Process
Diversity and Flexibility
Seventy-seven interviewees were embodied in 9 personas. Despite their diverse needs, their pain points were focused on two key characteristics, their desire to plan and their experience in travel. Our designs provided multiple ways of navigating the site and filtering information to accommodate divergent behaviors.
Timing is Everything
The right information at the right time
The designs provide glanceable, contextual information at strategic moments to help customers prepare and feel empowered knowing that they have current, relevant information available when they need it most.
Your Experience
Designed.
While the result provided a clear route for each of Sydney Airport's nine customer segments, the journey to get to the final design wasn't quite so direct. It was my responsibility ensure our research insights were carried through visual design and into development.
Collaboration through to Implementation
I worked closely with our developers to build a site map and responsive design guide that incorporated research and testing findings into every detail.
Discovery and Iteration
A higher standard
Airport website neglect.
We studied countless airline websites and performed a competitive review of the top ten, reviewing home page function, navigation, nomenclature, wayfinding, and planning and accessibility information. The final ten were exceptional in comparison to the average airport sites which were often cluttered with adds, difficult to navigate, and had little information hierarchy. The sites that excelled had clear CTAs prioritizing the most frequently visited pages and did not sacrifice the customer experience for an advertising agenda.
How did you arrive here?
Most Frequent Landing Pages
Through customer interviews and Google Analytics studies of the existing site, we learned that many people only ended up on airport website through a google search for specific information (details on travel procedures, parking, and detailed flight information). We investigated further and learned that in the case of the current Sydney airport website, the first page users landed on was "flights," not the homepage. This lead to further studies of what the purpose of the homepage would be.
The homepage debate
In the era of the all-powerful search engine, what is the purpose of the homepage?
Through our Google analytics studies of the existing site, we knew what information was critical to prioritize in the navigation and home page CTAs. But the conversation of how to use the entire screen real estate meant changing existing priorities. The existing site priorities communicated a different message: Sydney Airport - A parking garage and mall that happens to fly planes in and out. We worked to prioritize the user's needs for specific, customized information in the first screen view. Parking maintained a front row position as it was a primary reason customer's visited the site.