Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Kanopi Studios
San Francisco Airport
A one-of-a-kind, international airport serving the greater San Francisco area.
Founded in 1927, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is a dedicated organization serving the community of San Francisco, as well as the millions of travelers who pass through its doors each year. SFO strives to be safe and secure in all of its practices, including delivering a quality guest experience while being on the cutting edge of airport environmental and social sustainability initiatives. This is all accomplished while operating a successful and efficient business.
The Challenge
SFO’s previous site was outdated, cumbersome to navigate, and was built on an older version of Drupal that did not allow for more modern functionality. It was hard to update and created issues for the SFO team when new information needed to be presented. They wanted to modernize the site, making it more engaging, flexible, and easier to update. The new site also had to support their business goals, and bring more awareness to their vendors and activities at the airport.
About the project
The Solution
Kanopi met with seven different stakeholder groups and parsed through guest complaints to define the goals and pain points. Those final goals were:
- To design an intuitive navigation
- To provide a flexible design that allows admins the ability to create unique layouts based on the content.
- Integrate revenue-generating content within the natural flow of a guest’s experience.
- Better concession/amenity browsing.
- Weaving in the Bay Area’s feel.
- To redesign alerts to not be intrusive yet available on any page, even after that page was closed.
- To show more color and diversity across the food, art, and even the employees.
- To put a human face on SFO.
In order to prioritize these goals while leveraging the latest Drupal has to offer, Kanopi created flexible layouts that allow content admins to promote important initiatives throughout the site with little-to-no developer support needed. This was done through a simplified Drupal admin interface that eliminated much of the overhead encountered on the previous site.
We also created opportunities for users to become more engaged with the site via personalized dashboards that allow them to find content that is relevant to their travel plans. Kanopi utilized location data provided by Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN (AGCDN) to personalize content based on a site visitor’s country. By parsing header information provided by the AGCDN, and then configuring Drupal to display either individual components or whole pages based on that country, the SFO marketing department could run specific content campaigns on their site to visitors around the globe.
Key Features
User Dashboard
A customized user dashboard was created that personalizes both flight information and the pre-flight experience for each traveler.
Overall User Experience
Site navigation is easier to use and site design is more modern. Airport and flight information is easier to find and tailored to SFO users.
Client Dashboard
With an eye on usability, Kanopi ensured the admin experience was as easy to use as possible. Fields were organized to optimize a content editor’s workflow as they make updates to the site.
The Result
SFO now has an easier-to-use website that allows for quicker, more efficient updating. Visitors can enjoy a more responsive layout, modern navigation and an increased overall user experience. Vendors are more prominent with new “profiles” offering more detailed information on their offerings and locations within the airport. “Things to do” are more visible as well, lending to travelers having a more robust site experience.
Why Drupal was chosen
Aside from the fact that their previous site was built on Drupal 7; Drupal offers the flexibility, scalability and sustainability that the SFO team required. At its core, Drupal checked many of the requirements presented by the Fly SFO project.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
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Merge Translations: This module allowed content administrators to merge nodes with different languages to one translated node in Drupal 8+.
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OpenWeather: This module aided us in connecting with the OpenWeater API to show visitors of the site the current weather at SFO.
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Views random seed: This module allowed us to build lists of concessions and amenities at SFO in a true random order.
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Search API: this suite of modules allowed us to connect Drupal with Solr search to provide a rich search experience for users of the site.
