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BAA client story

BAA is the UK’s largest airport operator, responsible for Heathrow, Stanstead and Southampton (and until recently Gatwick) in England and Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. In 2007 they handled almost 150,000,000 passenger journeys through their various sites and Heathrow is consistently ranked as the world’s busiest international airport.

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Visualising the passenger journey

We can’t talk about all the projects we’ve completed for BAA, as some of them are confidential. The projects we can point to are the development of the Connections service and brand, and the design of a new type of information service at T5, Heathrow. We’re proud of the fact that we’ve gained all of our work through referrals, and that our clients have come from all parts of the business - from operations through to marketing and commercial teams.


Imagining the service in action

A national/public/private service provider
BAA traces its history right back to the very early days of commercial air travel. The British Airports Authority was formed by act of Parliament as a nationally owned company in 1965, and another act in 1986 privatised the organisations assets and led the way for a public listing as BAA in 1987. It was returned to private ownership in 2006 when a Spanish investment company, Ferrovial bought the firm.

Being a pioneer in aviation has been a mixed blessing for BAA. On the one hand they’ve realised significant first mover advantage from the explosion in air travel over the past three decades. But, being first in means that their infrastructure is older than rivals and has been built up slowly as the industry has grown - unlike competitors across Europe who have been able to learn from BAA and who currently have much newer building and service designs.

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Observing passengers behaviour to inspire service re-design

To stay focused, put people first
Innovating in BAA’s complex and competitive operating environment is tough, and BAA’s managers have to contend with myriad stakeholders (some statutory, others unionised, many with strong brands and high expectations) when proposing and then designing new airport services. 

To help our clients (and their stakeholders) understand and overcome these challenges, Engine’s approach to all of our projects for BAA has been to focus on the user’s experience of the service, and to take that experience as the central organising principle for the service’s design.

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Prototyping with actors, staff and other stakeholders

User Centred Design across the whole experience
We’ve used this user centred approach during early phases of projects by conducting research inspired by methods from ethnography across the whole airport journey; we’ve used it during design and development stages by building large scale prototypes of services and having real users help us iterate them; we’ve remained the user’s champion during implementation phases, acting as guardians of the concept, liaising with architects, design managers and staff training experts.


Connecting through Heathrow

We’re proud to be helping BAA become a more user centred organisation and we’re still working for BAA on a range of exciting projects, some with clients that we began working with over two years ago.  In the video below our client from the T5 information zone project talks about what it was like working with Engine: