Pilatus takes off with January and the new website
After a good twelve months of close cooperation between Pilatus Flugzeugwerke and the agency Januar Designbureau, the completely revised corporate website of the Stans-based aircraft manufacturer went online in August.
Emotional with a generous amount of images, puristic in its design concept and technologically state-of-the-art, the online presence underlines the values of the world-renowned Swiss aircraft manufacturer.
Agency Evaluation
In a multi-stage agency evaluation, the Zurich agency Januar Designbureau prevailed over numerous competitors. "We spoke the same language right from the start and appreciated the goal-oriented collaboration at eye level. Januar understood how to convey the perfect mix of high-end technology and our Swiss values in design." says Fabiola Felber, Project Manager Online Marketing, explaining the choice of the Zurich-based design and digital agency. The fact that a small and therefore very personal agency was chosen was a conscious decision by the international conglomerate and corresponds to the almost family-like corporate culture of Pilatus. It was clear from the outset that the web relaunch, like the aircraft, would bear the "Crafted in Switzerland" label.
International orientation
In joint workshops at the headquarters in Stans, the project team first identified the needs of the various stakeholders such as the sales teams of the different markets and aircraft types, marketing or human resources. This was followed by an analysis of the international aviation competitive environment. However, pages from neighboring sectors such as the automotive industry also served as a benchmark for the design and interaction design. Objectives such as a navigation hierarchy that is as flat as possible and generous image components served as conceptual cornerstones for the development of the content and the subsequent creation phase.
The new international website was to create a strong, emotional user experience and convey the fascination of flying. With this in mind, January's designers have further developed the Pilatus brand for the digital flight space in a contemporary way. Addressing both the target group of military training aircraft and lifestyle/business customers, without losing focus of the Swissness of the Pilatus brand for even a moment, was the requirement for Emanuel Gürth, Senior Designer, when developing the look & feel.
The central importance of mobile use is taken into account by a fully responsive implementation. Contrary to the mobile-first trend, the design started with the largest desktop version in order to be able to define an effective visual language as soon as possible and to develop a clear design concept with atmosphere, says Fredy Espejo, explaining this conscious decision. In this case, the subsequent reduction to mobile was the leaner and more targeted method.
The collaboration included conceptual support, the entire design process as well as the complete frontend programming.
Rocket Science Coding
Thanks to a multitude of micro-interactions and discreet animations, January has created a user experience with great attention to detail that makes aviation hearts beat faster and presents the extensive content intuitively and clearly.
In order to meet the high performance requirements, January relied on object-oriented coding (OOP) for the front-end programming, as is usually known from software development. The individual website modules can be used as required and developed individually - without any mutual dependencies. Based on the most important page types, an actual toolbox was created, which massively facilitates ongoing and independent maintenance for the marketing team. The object-oriented approach also ensures fast browser-side interpretation and compilation, with significant time savings also in debugging and ongoing maintenance. In favor of a featherweight codebase, the site focuses on the latest browser versions, but with fallbacks or omission of critical features on deprecated environments.
A decisive success factor for the complex project was the close cooperation between January's senior frontend developer Vince Hehlen and the backend specialists at Pilatus, who transferred the website to their in-house developed CMS system based on Symfony/PHP.
Responsible at Pilatus Aircraft Works: Jérôme Zbinden (overall responsibility); Fabiola Felber (online marketing management). Responsible at January Designbureau: Fredy Espejo, Emanuel Gürth (project management, concept, design); Vince Hehlen (technical realization).
