News06

01Expertise and Practice Areas

All Of Our Secrets

  1. We only make digital products & services.

    Product Strategy, User Research, Design, Technology, Analytics & Optimization: everything you need to make a successful digital product or service, and nothing more.

  2. Prototypes, not presentations.

    In our experience, the biggest ideas usually come from hard work during iterative design and development. Forrester Research called our way of working “a model to follow.”

  3. One team: Client + Work & Co.

    We ask our clients to participate directly with us in an intensely collaborative process based on specific measures of success, rapid prototyping, and continuous testing and improvement. The result is one combined team, making things the right way, with less time invested in presentations and arbitrary deliverables.

  4. Fewer people. More senior people.

    Each client engagement is led by one of our partners. We’ve assembled an unprecedented level of hands-on talent under one roof to make this possible across multiple projects. We’re top-heavy, by design.

  5. Good products require good development.

    The best digital products and services are made by designers and engineers working together in the same room. We created Work & Co to offer the benefits of such collaborations at scale.

03Our Work: Virgin America Case Study

iOS. ANDROID. RESPONSIVE WEB.

The best digital ecosystem in travel.

Virgin America is making flying fun again. In 2014, the airline also decided to reinvent the digital travel experience.

After an exhaustive search for the right partner, the company chose Work & Co to design and engineer a new digital platform that could respond to modern travel needs and behaviors.

We partnered with Virgin America to design and develop the world’s first responsive airline website to meet the needs of modern travelers. As its digital agency of record, we extended the tech-forward experience to mobile in 2016, launching a new native app for iOS and Android. Within hours, Virgin America was the #1 featured app on both the App Store and Google Play.

Our Contributions

  • Strategy
  • Product Roadmapping
  • User Research
  • Design
  • Branding
  • Responsive Web Development
  • Software Application Architecture
  • iOS and Android Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • Analytics & Optimization

The Website

“The first radical rethinking of the flight booking experience in a decade.”

— WIRED

The First ResponsiveAirline Site

Who says airline websites are too complex to be responsive? The Work & Co technology team built a site that works wherever you are, so you have a great experience at any point of your trip, from a laptop to a mobile device.

Focused Measuresof Success

“In the early phases of the project, the Work & Co team determined that the client’s KPIs were driven by a few really important use cases, not by twenty of them. So they focused their attention on those and on doing fewer things beautifully well. And by getting the teams closer together, they were able to get feedback earlier. They did not spend time creating slick presentation decks, but instead built working prototypes of ideas—the CEO saw concepts for the site in the second week of the project. As a result, there were no big reveals, no gotcha surprises, and no selling.”

Digital FirstBranding

Virgin America has deployed Work & Co’s new look and feel across their other communication channels, from billboards in Times Square to airports. The face of Virgin America is changing, beginning with VirginAmerica.com. Illustrations by Build.

Technology-ledProcess

An amazing front-end experience is only possible with a robust technology solution backing it. Like most airlines, Virgin America’s booking technology is powered by Sabre, a decades-old back-end system. We had to create an architecture that would provide the flexibility we needed. To achieve radical changes such as a single-page booking flow, we used and extended AngularJS on top of a layer that sits between Sabre and the front-end.

Outcomes

After successfully A/B testing the new design against the old, Virgin America’s reinvented site was released. Virgin America announced an IPO following two successful quarters running the new site. It has exceeded performance goals in the following areas:

Increase in conversion rate
Decrease in web-related phone calls
Fastest loading airline website

The App

“This is no ordinary airline app.”

— Digital Trends

The industry’s fastest flight booking

Most airlines don’t prioritize capturing incremental booking revenue in-app, but we believe that the app should be your travel companion from the moment you plan your trip to when you land. So we made the fastest booking experience in the industry—guests can book a ticket in 60 seconds or less.

Smarter, focused,and context aware

To make traveling as effortless as possible, the app serves up information personalized to a guest’s travel schedule. 24 hours before a flight, it shifts into travel mode, showing guests only the most critical information first: check-in, boarding pass, and flight alert information.

Two Native Apps,Less Code

No shortcuts were taken. To build an app that is simple, enjoyable, and fast, we envisioned a new strategy for cross-platform mobile app development.

We developed iOS and Android simultaneously. In order to speed up development and reduce maintenance, we created a shared layer of business logic for all platforms. So when we have to make a change, it updates across every platform, a strategy so radical it was featured in The Next Web.

Outcomes

  1. Featured app in App Store and Google Play
  2. Increase in mobile conversion rate
  3. Downloads in less than three months

Industry Responses

  • “Work & Co was a completely different kind of partner. They took something very complex and created a simple, beautiful, and intuitive user experience.”

    LUANNE CALVERT, CMO, VIRGIN AMERICA

  • “The result is a site that gets flyers booked nearly twice as fast, on any kind of device.”

    Wired

  • “Most impressive industry evolution.”

    UX Awards

  • “Both the process and the outcome offer techniques that other companies looking to build innovative products and services can follow.”

    Forrester Research

  • “An impressively simple experience for booking, managing, and checking in to flights.”

    Travel + Leisure

Honors

  • 5webby awards
  • 3pixel awards
  • 3cannes lions
  • 1clio
  • 1digiday
  • 1one show
  • 1UX awards
  • 1ces innovation award
  • 1
  • 1

See Also

05Facts About Us

Employees

Who care about doing three things well: Product Strategy, Design, and Engineering. That’s it.

Headquarters

DUMBO, Brooklyn. With offices in Portland, Oregon, and São Paulo, Brazil.

Partners

And every project is directly overseen by one of them. We’re “top-heavy” on purpose; in our experience, senior, hands-on talent creates the best digital products and services.

Big Reveals

We form a team with our clients and deliver prototypes, not presentations.

Repeat business rate

Nearly all of our clients have offered us additional projects.

Days to a prototype

For most projects, we complete a full design cycle and begin testing with consumers on a prototype within one month.

Born outside the U.S.

It takes a global perspective to build products and services the world uses every day.

New Platforms

Now live on Xbox, the new Showtime experience will soon launch on 4 additional video game consoles and smart TVs.

Page weight of VirginAmerica.com

Using AngularJS for the build, we halved the page weight of the average airline site.

06News

Work & Co Named 2018 Agency of the Year

November 16, 2018. In its biggest annual awards show —drawing hundreds of submissions from top companies— Digiday crowned Work & Co the 2018 Agency of the Year.

Said Digiday in announcing the honor: “The digital product agency, which shipped 56 products in the last year, has worked for clients like Apple and Google. The 250-person Brooklyn-based shop has continued to stand their ground on issues like climate change and immigration rights.”

Judges for the competition hailed from leading brands, including BMW North America, Pernod Ricard, HBO, Blink Fitness, Budweiser, Disney, MetLife, and The Tory Burch Foundation. Criteria to choose a winner included an assessment of company growth and health, plus demonstrable success in four key areas: creativity; innovative thinking; consumer value; and results related to KPIs.

"This recognition is a sign the marketplace is reorienting around a world with no separation between digital products and brands," said Gene Liebel, Founding Partner at Work & Co. “In our model, they are one and the same.” He added: “It was especially gratifying to help our client partners at Givewith earn an award too.”

Givewith —which launched in April as a radical new way of approaching corporate social responsibility— won the top prize in the category of Best Brand Platform.

Wrote Digiday: “Brands can grow their businesses while contributing more to society by including social impact as part of their digital ad buys. Their belief that profit and improving the world around us are not mutually exclusive has allowed them to support Girls Who Code, Rebuilding Together and many other charities, resulting in 176 additional girls participating in coding programs, 13,000 students receiving new backpacks filled with school supplies and over 112,000 trees planted.”

For more about Givewith head here and more about the Digiday Awards, head here.

In Other News

  • 00 Introduction
  • 01 Expertise
  • 02 Clients
  • 03 Virgin America
  • 04 Leadership
  • 05 Facts
  • 06 News
  • 07 Careers