With offices and cus­tomers across the globe, UFA is the worlds pre­mier devel­op­er of Air Traf­fic Con­trol sim­u­la­tion sys­tems, pro­vid­ing ver­sa­tile con­troller train­ing to lead­ing air nav­i­ga­tion ser­vice providers, mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions, and universities.

While UFAs tech is sec­ond to none, when they came to studio.zeldman, their web­site was­nt doing all it could to tell their sto­ry and con­vey their strongest brand attrib­ut­es. UFAs nar­row, fixed-width site had not been updat­ed in years, and it showed. In com­par­i­son to some com­peti­tors web­sites, UFAs appeared dat­ed, which was not putting the best foot for­ward for a lead­ing-edge tech com­pa­ny aim­ing to win new busi­ness and retain exist­ing customers. 

In this cat­e­go­ry, brand impres­sion is every­thing. Good design cre­ates impres­sions of qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, hall­marks that cus­tomers find high­ly attrac­tive. It also com­pels read­ers to spend addi­tion­al time inter­act­ing with con­tent. At its most basic lev­el, then, our redesign had to firm­ly posi­tion UFA as the top-tier play­er it is, bring­ing coher­ence, ele­gance, and clar­i­ty to the site expe­ri­ence while con­vey­ing the com­pa­nys brand attrib­ut­es of cut­ting-edge tech and extra­or­di­nary engi­neer­ing precision.

Narratives and navigation

UFA had news to share and sto­ries to tell, but the old site buried this invalu­able infor­ma­tion on a sub-page, while the home page did lit­tle (via copy and pho­tog­ra­phy) to tell UFAs sto­ry, posi­tion the brand, and invite key per­sonas to take advan­tage of the sites offerings. 

Our redesign went beyond sim­ply sur­fac­ing news head­lines on the home pageit active­ly romances that news. To accom­plish this, we cre­at­ed a redesigned mul­ti-lev­el home page and news sec­tion, craft­ed to both ori­ent the vis­i­tor and inspire explo­ration of news items. This involved pro­vid­ing breath­ing space and dra­ma direct­ly on the home page, while also cre­at­ing a con­ver­sion fun­nel that begins qual­i­fy­ing poten­tial cus­tomers the moment they engage with the sites content.

Stake­hold­er inter­views and our own research told us that cus­tomers also had dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ences between UFAs sophis­ti­cat­ed prod­uct offer­ings. To help address that con­cern, we applied a com­bi­na­tion of updat­ed iconog­ra­phy, a more focused copy plat­form, and revised site archi­tec­ture, along with engag­ing imagery from UFAs own archives.

The design process

To move sure­ly but also quick­ly, our design process avoid­ed out­dat­ed water­fall meth­ods in favor of quick pro­to­types and check-ins. For exam­ple, instead of expen­sive and time-con­sum­ing full-blown, mul­ti-page Pho­to­shop comps, we designed two style tiles empha­siz­ing dif­fer­ent brand attrib­ut­es. At a glance, our client was able to eas­i­ly choose the best design direc­tion, and from there, the site was designed in the browsera method that is accu­rate, effi­cient, and appro­pri­ate for todays mobile-first, respon­sive web.

A platform for today and tomorrow

Because it was a studio.zeldman project, the site also had to work for pret­ty much any per­son, on pret­ty much any device, regard­less of that per­sons or devices capa­bil­i­ties. Acces­si­ble, inclu­sive design built on a reli­able archi­tec­ture of seman­tic markup and pro­gres­sive enhance­ment ensures that the new design will work as well in the future as it does today.

Addi­tion­al­ly, we built a friend­ly plat­form via Word­Press enabling UFA to not only eas­i­ly update their sites archi­tec­ture and con­tent as their prod­uct offer­ings change, but to also share news with an engaged read­er­shipem­pow­er­ing UFA to con­tin­ue mod­i­fy­ing the site with con­fi­dence, with­out fear of exceed­ing inter­nal resources or need­ing to pay for exter­nal ones. 

Last­ly, we shaped the new sites archi­tec­ture so as to help UFA qual­i­fy and begin con­vert­ing good prospects­be­cause a busi­ness site should do more than just look good and work well for every­one. It should be the orga­ni­za­tions first salesman.

Vis­it the new site.

Our responsibilities on this project

Research; user expe­ri­ence design; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; con­tent strat­e­gy; inter­face design; front-end code; back-end development.