flydubai is Dubai's first low-cost airline operating routes to more than 45 destinations across the Middle East, Subcontinent, Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe.

flydubai is one of the fastest growing start-up airlines in the world and currently has a fleet of 23 brand new Boeing 737-800 NG aircraft operating from its headquarters at Terminal 2, Dubai International Airport. Three years after its inaugural commercial flight, flydubai is now making more than 800 flights a week, has over 300 pilots and 500 cabin crew, flying thousands of passengers across its network.

flydubai offer a modern fleet and a quality product at an affordable price and are continuing to expand and their routes and extend their service.

Splendid has been working with flydubai since 2010 to design and build a marketing, acquisition and transactional website which provides a flexible platform to support the business as it grows.

The Brief

Splendid were asked by flydubai to design and build an entirely new online experience for both web and mobile including an evolution of the flydubai digital brand.

The solution needed to resonate with the business ambition and brand culture as well as deliver hard targets on conversion once the site was launched.

Overarching project objectives included

. Redefining the online identity
. Increasing conversions
. Increasing repeat custom
. Increasing ancillary revenues
. Providing an efficient mechanism for amendments
. Improving the brand experience
. Build a robust platform capable of scaling as the business grows

The website is the primary sales channel and information portal for flydubai and for some customers is the first experience they will have in dealing with the company. To this end it was imperative the redesign not only reflected the brand values of flydubai but also provided a world class customer experience to ensure clients find what they are looking for, transact with flydubai and return in future. In addition the site needed to be clean modern and extensible to allow for additional products or services to be incorporated as the business develops.

The Project

Employing Splendid's User Centred Design methodology, a modern and accessible site was designed, aligned to both the business model and the key user objectives and tested with target users. The site designs were used as a basis to evolve the already strong flydubai brand into a digital language that can be deployed across all technology platforms including a mobile variant of the site's core functionality.

Our development process delivered the UI code in advance of the technical build allowing flydubai to see the site components (the web pages and modules) before the full functionality was integrated. Following on from this we entered the full development cycle whereby the site CMS and booking engine integration are built in a production emulation environment and iteratively tested through the UAT process.

Splendid has worked closely with flydubai to bring this site to fruition including a dynamic content management system and a fully transactional mobile site variant in both English and Arabic.

The Design

Design phases for this project encompassed branding evolution, interaction design (including Information Architecture), user testing and ultimately branded visual design of the full set of site modules.

The site features both English and Arabic versions of the site and defined a simple easy to use booking path that meets the varied requirements of the flydubai client base. To refine the interaction to meet these requirements the solution prototype was tested thoroughly using English speaking and Arabic test subjects.

In addition to meeting the key user requirements we worked closely with flydubai to ensure the site would meet critical business objectives including the cross sell of ancillary products (extensible) and the ability to upsell fares based on flexibility (which is crucial in their target markets).

The interaction design was also re-factored to create a browser based mobile variant which was deployed at the same time as the main site. The mobile variant is device agnostic and optimised to operate seamlessly in limited bandwidth areas.

Other features of the site include rich media and mapping experiences, clear architecture and easy destination browsing along with a host of client specific functionality allowing passengers to manage their bookings, monitor flight status, browse timetables and facilitate other travel requirements.

In delivering the site designs Splendid also evolved the online brand of flydubai to bring the site up to the standard of the visual brand as it appears offline and on the flydubai fleet. The resultant site is a fresh, modern, clean usable experience that resonates with the flydubai brand and product quality.

The Technology

In building the flydubai website we separated the booking site from the marketing site to enable separate scaling and deployments as well as easier maintenance and tiered security.

The flydubai site utilises our Splendid Content Management System for the marketing and acquisition areas of the site. The Splendid Content Management System provides real time ability to edit any live text across the site, add pages and sections and reconfigure page structures using a bespoke library of flexible content modules. Live text is used extensively to enable maximum flexibility of the interface and to provide an extensible marketing platform for flydubai product managers.

The CMS features tiered security controls to allow different groups and individuals to edit, review, approve and publish changes in a controlled fashion to match business workflows. Inline WYSIWYG editing is present in text modules as well as multi-lingual editing of core business entities stored in the database. The CMS can also be used to instantly switch the site layout and styling to any of the contingency (emergency) states should any incident occur that warrants it.

The booking site was built to manage web services provided by flydubai's technical partner Radixx and to integrate with a number of external service providers (including the payment partner MIGS).
The booking site supports complex business logic whereby both allowable and chargeable baggage as well as seat allocation is determined using variable factors such as the passenger type (adult/child/infant), the fare type, the current flight inventory and flight route.

The logic surrounding booking changes is implemented to allow extensibility and has been built with full redundancy so that a failure of any 3rd party integration will not prevent bookings which could otherwise continue without the unavailable service (e.g. the insurance module is removed from the booking path when TravelGuard is offline).

The integrated search facility provides the ability to search routes by airport code, city name, airport name or map. As the globalised site already supports Arabic and English this allows additional languages to be added without editing the underlying business logic.

The site has been optimised for high performance using distributed caching was developed with extensive use of design patterns (IOC, Repository, Factory, Singleton, Strategy). The system is integrated with a Splendid custom CMS and a number of external systems (Connectpoint, WCF Service Layer, MIGS payment gateway).

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