ROKKAN Makes the Connection for Virgin America
The Brief:
Virgin America now offers travelers a new destination: its own lifestyle website created by bicoastal, full-service interactive agency ROKKAN. ROKKAN designed the entire site to give Virgin America enthusiasts a single online location to experience the brand, hear about Virgin America news and promotions, insider tips, stores, games and book tickets.
Hip, tech-savvy travelers with an affinity for the airline can already find plenty of Virgin America content on blogs and video sharing sites - including the Victoria's Secret in-flight fashion show and the airline's unique safety video. This new site consolidates this exciting content, with a user-generated central brand experience.
The new online community provides that and more, and gives Virgin America a dynamic connection with its audience. The sleek site invites visitors to share their own Virgin America stories in "Mind of a Traveler," play games in "Toy Box". While this site supplements Virgin America's commercial site, visitors can easily book a flight from any page, join Elevate, the airline's loyalty program, and see what routes are on sale - without leaving the community.
By consistently creating and publishing fresh Virgin America content, the airline will become more searchable, thus increasing traffic to booking and sales. Since the site is both engaging and informative, it's able to attract new audiences and give loyal Virgin America brand enthusiasts a destination to continue living the brand, even after their flight.
Making the Site:
"Our suggestion was to build a community site with the firm goal of creating a simple dialogue. It wasn't about making a robust community site where people make friends. We're not trying to recreate
Facebook," commented Charles Bae, Executive Creative Director and Lead Designer.
The site needed to meet three major goals: first, it had to be a useful and fun community site that was easily accessible by search; it had to represent the Virgin America brand apart from the company's official site; and it had to meet the high expectations of Virgin America's customers, providing them with airline news, event information, entertainment, and fare updates. ROKKAN created a site that invited conversation between customers and the airline, giving guests information about the airline, and giving the company insight about its customers. For example, if you're a foodie, "Virgin America wants to know your top five restaurants in your favorite city," remarked Bae.
Designing the site to meet Virgin America's high standards of search engine accessibility, performance, and reliability required careful strategy - and some proprietary software.
"The PHP-based website was developed with our proprietary development kit, Rokkit, which is built on the Zend Framework," said Akeem Philbert, Senior Developer and Technology Lead. "For SEO purposes, we avoided Flash in favor of JavaScript libraries, which allowed us to achieve our design objectives without compromising accessibility. We used the JQuery JavaScript library extensively throughout the site, MooTools for animations, and a number of libraries to aid cross-browser compatibility."
ROKKAN's relationship with Virgin America continues to yield innovative designs and solid executions, and the airline's new site is just the latest example.
"ROKKAN was able to pinpoint the needs of the airline in the digital space, with precision," Bae noted. "Our sensitivity to their needs has always been a huge part of our successful partnership."
ROKKAN Creds:
Account Director: John Noe
Account Manager: Jessica Altus
Sr. Producer: Nicole Rannou
Director of UX: Chung Ng
Senior IA: Annie Wong
Creative Director: Charles Bae
Art Director: Rine Miele
Tech Director: Akeem Philbert
Tech Leads: Katrina Milkova, Andy Prodnak, Jim Williams
|
