Denver International Airport

Sector(s)

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Organizations Involved

Spire Digital, of Kin + Carta

CX and Responsive Web Design
In 2014, Denver International Airport (DIA) needed a new website that could accommodate its standing as the number 1 airport in the nation and 15th-busiest airport in the world and the fifth-busiest in the United States. With more than 53 million passengers traveling through the airport each year, DIA’s site—flydenver.com—is an important stopover and hub of information for the public. DIA partnered with Spire Digital to develop a new and better customer experience with a responsive web design that included custom integrations such as flight search, an interactive airport map and real-time parking and security updates—all able to scale in size for any device or screen.

About the project

State-Of-The-Art Mobile Experience
The previous DIA website was dated, non-responsive and ineffective for the traveler who needed real-time content while on the move. The new site at flydenver.com needed to convey the airport’s refreshed identity, alerting the public to major art exhibitions and collections, the latest in fine-dining restaurants and updates on the new hotel and transit centers under construction. As well, it needed to provide a state-of-the-art mobile experience for busy travelers.

Feature Design Approach
Spire met with DIA stakeholders to design a set of features that would serve its customers well, while ensuring a six-month delivery. Spire’s creative team aimed to create a sense of place by focusing on the airport’s unique architectural elements, using a palette drawn from images found in DIA’s rich photography library. In parallel, Spire’s interaction designers began work on a mobile web application, pulling pertinent information, tools and quick links to the homepage, ensuring mobile users could get to the information they needed as quickly as possible. While design took shape, Spire custom-built the site in PHP and housed it in a Drupal CMS, testing every major piece of functionality for flight search, maps, security waits and parking updates.

Fully Responsive Custom Website
Within the six-month timeframe, Spire designed, developed and delivered a fully responsive custom website for the new flydenver.com just in time for the 2014-2015 holiday travel season, in which November set total international traveler records for DIA. The new custom website’s features and seamless design across devices are modern and sophisticated, much like the airport itself. Most importantly, the new website provides infinite value to internal and external DIA stakeholders.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupa was selected for the Denver International Airport website because it is open-source, flexible, scalable, and have capabilities to integrate with 100s of other tools.