Rebuilding an airport app that was already live, without losing its listing

What we did

Redesigned it

The brand’s navy and gold stayed. Everything else was drawn again around them, one screen at a time — 96 of them settled on paper before a single one was built.

Rebuilt it

The app was written once and runs on Android and on iPhone from that one piece of work, so a change lands in both places instead of being paid for twice.

Took over what runs it

The servers behind the app and the admin system the client manages its airports from came to us from the previous supplier while the work was under way. They are ours to answer for now.

On a real phone, on the live system

Not a design. A phone, in a terminal, with the real answers on it.

Three captures from one session on a real phone, which was set to English. The weather, the prayer time and every place on these screens arrived while the capture was being taken, from the same system that answers the app for everybody else.

The airport

Pick an airport, and the app stops being general.

Everything after the map belongs to one airport: its own categories, its own terminals, its own places. Search runs on name, city and airport code, because a traveller types AMM as readily as they type Amman.

Inside the terminal

The four things a traveller opens a phone for.

Money, prayer, weather, food. The converter writes every amount the way its own currency is written, and shows the moment the rate was fetched rather than the word «live». Prayer times carry the calculation method and the madhab, because one set of times is wrong for somebody.

The community

Travellers talking to each other, with a way out of the conversation.

Rooms belong to a country, so the people answering are where you are. Messages disappear after twenty four hours. Every message can be reported and every traveller can be blocked, and those screens were designed before launch rather than added after the first complaint.

The screens nobody demos

Permission, verification, an empty list. This is where apps are actually judged.

A location prompt that says what the location is for. A verification screen that survives a wrong code. An empty saved list that tells you how to fill it. None of these sell a demo and all of them are on the path of a first-time user, so each one was drawn, written in both languages, and checked like any other screen.

Two languages

The Arabic is not the English flipped.

Both sides carry 607 lines of wording, and the app refuses to be released if Arabic falls one line behind. Counts are the part that is usually wrong: Arabic says a number six different ways, so two places, three places and eleven places are three different sentences, and the one-or-many pair English gets away with cannot say them. The layout mirrors, the icons mirror, the back arrow mirrors, and Latin names inside an Arabic line stay the right way round.

One app, two phones

Written once, for Android and for iPhone.

The screens, the wording and everything behind them are one piece of work rather than two, which is what keeps the two phones from drifting apart and what stops the client paying twice for the same change. Android is the one on the store today; the iPhone version is written from the same work and has not been put on a store yet.