auckland airport 2016

A full redesign and rebuild of the Auckland Airport digital experiences for all its departments including travel, retail, parking, operations & properties.

Client: Auckland Airport

Roles: Lead visual & interaction design / ideation / prototyping / IA & content strategy / team lead

the challenge

In 2015 TBWA embarked upon a journey that took the Auckland Airport’s brand to a new frontier. Digital Arts Network was engaged as their digital partner in envisioning what the new online experiences would be like for all of the Auckland Airport’s departments: travel, retail, parking, operations and properties. The Digital Arts team also proposed improvements on the Airport’s e-commerce and mobile app design.

This was a multi-faceted digital project where I led a team of designers and collaborated with front-end developers, account managers and TBWA’s brand team over the course of several months. I was also responsible in presenting concepts to the clients and their IT partners. Other challenges included managing a large Airport’s teams with competing agendas, as well my own design team which included a couple of new members. This project also ran simultaneously with a new brand that was still being developed by TBWA’s creative team, which meant that frequent communication was crucial to the project’s success.

Preliminary Design

To make sure the team was aligned, we had weekly team catchups and daily stand-ups to communicate our progress. We worked out the website’s grid-system and text hierarchy across all digital touch points early on with the front-end developers.

These preliminary works were important in aligning our vision and putting the project scaffold in place to support the massive undertaking within time and budget constraints.