Edmonton International Airport

The Edmonton International Airport Authority, or EIA, manages a fast-growing international airport in Northern Alberta. They’re working hard to raise their profile and market share, in constant competition with a neighbouring airport. They had just undergone a huge rebranding project to completely revamp their image, and extensive renovations to give their customers a better experience.

The project: an airport website redesign RFP

Problem was, the website couldn’t follow through with the brand’s promise. It was dated and clunky, built on legacy technology and managed through a legacy CMS that made content editing challenging. The EIA team didn't want legacy technology getting in the way of telling their story.

The solution

User research and stakeholder research

Faced with a six month timeline and limited budget, we had to prioritize. Through several discovery workshop sessions, we investigated their biggest issues. What changes would make the biggest impact for EIA’s internal team and their customers? We focused on the core user tasks: what do air travellers most need to know or do before they get on a plane? Then we created the content, design, and technology systems to make that happen.

Content strategy and information architecture

EIA had a lot of duplicate content – most of it out of date. After an extensive content audit, we eliminated mountains of unnecessary content to streamline navigation and focus on core use cases. We rebuilt their website information architecture to reflect user tasks, not internal organization structure. We created content templates that helped the EIA team create structured, semantic web content to meet their users’ needs. Then we used an automated content migration tool to migrate hundreds of pages from the legacy CMS into the new Drupal website structure.

User experience design and visual design

We redesigned the airport website’s entire look and feel to show off their new brand. We worked directly with the client team in an iterative design process, and built style tiles and functional wireframes so they could see exactly what their site would look like and how it would behave. The responsive web design (RWD) build works on any device, which completely eliminated the need for the separate mobile application they had been maintaining.

Custom Drupal development

Once Drupal theming and content migration was complete, it was time to build some custom Drupal components.

Flight arrival and departure information is EIA’s most important content. The tool they used to store and display this info, the Flight Information Display System (FIDS), pulled info from multiple sources, and was updated constantly. Our new build had to work perfectly, or we’d have some upset passengers on our hands.

FIDS is a heavy-duty web application, so we had to make sure website performance wasn’t affected. It pulls data from an external database, joining multiple tables to build an ever-changing list of flight data. Our operations and development teams spent countless hours troubleshooting and testing it to make sure it had the right content and great performance, all on a Microsoft Windows platform, running IIS on the front-end and SQL Server on the back-end. For all you non-nerds out there, that ain’t easy.

The results

Our content strategy and governance work helped the EIA team optimize their work across all of their online communications channels. The entire EIA team learned how to create, implement, and maintain web content that works.

Our user experience strategy and responsive web design solution means that EIA won’t have to redesign their entire website again in a few years when technology changes – it’s ready for whatever the future of the web might bring.

And their new open-source Drupal CMS means that creating and maintaining the website is easier than ever. The communications team can manage their entire workflow in one place, instead of sifting through emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings to get things done.

On top of all that, we also:

• Helped the communications team leverage their new CMS to create great web content, and decentralize content authorship for more efficiency
• Created a user experience that helps users find the information they want quickly and easily, no matter what their device
• Created a more flexible online advertising framework, allowing EIA to drive more revenue through their web channels
• Helped internal stakeholders communicate their most important messages
• Shifted the internal team’s focus to content and readability, so their website became a valuable resource instead of a filing cabinet full of legacy content