En Voyage_Issue#11_Flickbook

Business
BRAND NEW
DIGITAL THINKING
Oi, the largest creative and digital marketing agency in the Channel Islands, has been
Aurigny’s retained agency for the past two years. In that time the agency pitched for, and
won, the project to completely redesign and rebuild the airline’s online flight booking website
- against some stiff opposition. Arguably the most high-profile job for one of the most highprofile
clients in Guernsey, this task was always going to be challenging at the very least.
STEP 1
HOW WE LISTENED AND LEARNED
It was paramount that the team understood what the
general public wanted and expected from a new website,
so we undertook extensive focus groups led by our
research partner 4insight. From behind one-way glass
the team and the client were able to hear, first-hand,
what the users expected, and we learnt very quickly
that this website was Guernsey’s life-line to the rest of
the world and its importance couldn’t be understated.
The research was clear and unanimous, the public
simply wanted a website that was easy to use.
AN EXAMPLE OF EYE-TRACKING FROM
RESEARCH PARTNER 4INSIGHT
STEP 2
HOW WE COLLABORATED AND CREATED
The design team set about creating mockups
and testing them on users using eye-tracking and
one-to-one interviews to uncover real insight
into what worked and what didn’t. This process
proved invaluable, the team was able to iterate on
designs quickly, giving almost instant feedback.
We used Marvel (marvelapp.com) as our platform
for prototyping websites. This doesn’t mean
wireframing though. We found wireframing had
very little use when there were tools like Marvel
at our disposal to help us bring flat visuals to life.
Think of it as a sort of halfway-house between
the flat visuals and a full final website build.
How a website looks is one thing, but how
it feels to use is where the real value lies.
The first of the user-interface design tasks was to
establish a visual language. This was important since
a clear and simple visual language will successfully
get users from A to B (literally!), but one created from
arbitrary choices on colour and form only served to
confuse users, causing massive booking delays.
After positive feedback from our second tranche
of user eye-tracking and one-to-one interviews
we moved into the development phase. The initial
build was a year in the making and took 4,260 man
hours. The build was particularly challenging as we
were heavily restricted on functionality due to the
underlying flight booking system we had to plug into.
This required a considerable amount of ‘thinkingoutside-the-box’
and a bucketload of ‘can-doattitudes’
to get many of the features off the ground.
114 En Voyage | Aurigny’s Magazine