Delta Home & Away: An immersive digital travel guide for sports fans.
Giving sports fans an intimate look at what their favorite athletes love to do—home & away.
Project Overview
PRPL teamed up with Octagon to create a digital travel guide for Delta Airlines® that showcases the diverse destinations frequented by professional athletes and teams during their time at home and away games.
Work
Athletes Featured
Businesses Highlighted
PRPL & Octagon: Delta’s Dream Team
As part of a larger branding effort aimed at connecting people–rather than just places—to their communities, Delta wanted to create a fully immersive experience for sports fans eager to learn even more about their favorite players. Enter: Delta Home & Away, a digital travel guide designed to highlight the food, fun, and culture found throughout the various places that today’s top athletes frequent while traveling for games.
Delta was eager to narrate a story through the lens of the athletes themselves. Octagon was looking for a creative agency with the digital expertise to bring their vision to life, which presented another opportunity for a winning PRPL Agency Partnership.
Bringing Big Brands Together
It was important to preserve and showcase Delta’s iconic branding while, at the same time, successfully capturing the nuances of each sports team brand and the unique personalities of every featured athlete. By closely following every brand’s guidelines and getting to know the interests and traits of the different players, we put Delta, the teams, and the athletes in the spotlight to create a more memorable product experience.
Storytelling for the Win
Showcasing the unique and authentic perspectives of the various athletes across a range of different experiences was critical—but so was properly representing each team brand. After close collaboration and concepting, our goal was to funnel users through the site by athlete profiles or city locations. Then, we incorporated unique design elements and features to make for a more compelling user (and sports fan) experience.
From player cards, videos, and graphics to a geo-targeted, story-driven map experience, we began narrating the story of every athlete’s travels and the wide range of communities they were exploring in real-time.
Player Cards
To begin the journey throughout the site, we incorporated player cards. Each athlete is introduced via a unique image on individual swipeable cards that invite fans to dive into their location selections. They are also shuffled so no one player or team can dominate the site and experience at any given time
Interactive Maps
Using Mapbox, we created an exploratory experience that incorporates highly interactive maps. Here, users can interact with the different data plot markers, discovering new areas and information for an experience that puts them in control at every turn.
Photos & Videos
With photographers on location at different away games, Delta invested in capturing players enjoying what they love. Every thoughtfully chosen piece of content helped to bring each player and location to life, giving users an intimate look at what their favorite athletes love most.
User-First Design & Development
We were tasked with developing a fully responsive web-app-style platform engineered to provide a seamless experience across devices. We started by mapping out the user journey, identifying key touchpoints and interactions that would inform the design from beginning to end. This step was crucial in understanding their needs and expectations, in turn, allowing us to create a more intuitive interface and flow. With this insight as our guide, we started building high-fidelity designs that simulated an authentic user experience, complete with clear navigation and exciting interactivity. This also allowed us to visualize and better present each design concept before moving on to the development phase.
Next-Level Tech Stack
Leveraging the power of React for its component-based architecture and Next.js for its server-side rendering capabilities, we engineered a beautiful, high-performing and scalable website. These technologies were pivotal in ensuring a smooth and responsive user experience, as well as in facilitating distributed hosting via Vercel for better load balancing and reduced latency.
Next.js
As a powerful React-based framework offering features like server-side rendering and static site generation, Next.js was essential for SEO and performance, while providing a built-in routing system that allowed for better content organization and the generation of direct links.
Mapbox
Mapbox’s robust mapping and location capabilities helped bring our geographic data to life through customizable and intricate map designs. Users can interact with these markers where all the locations from the JSON data are plotted, clicking on them to reveal more information or navigating through the map to explore different areas. Implementing these features felt like having our very own Google Maps tailored specifically for the critical branding needs of the project which gave us a richer and more interactive experience—that now our end-users can enjoy.
JSON Data Mapping
We used JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to serve as the data store for the project. Since these files are structured in a way that is both human and machine-readable, it made it easier for our team to manage and update important data when linking teams, athletes, and cities to individual locations.
Playing With the Power of AI
ChatGPT and Midjourney were indispensable resources that kept the project moving seamlessly. While ChatGPT's content generation laid the groundwork for the mock-up prototypes, MidJourney's placeholder photography enabled us to visualize the complete user interface. Both contributed to maintaining project momentum, ensuring that the development phase could proceed without waiting for the final assets.
Quicker Content Generation
In earlier stages of the project, ChatGPT was instrumental in generating content for mock-up prototypes. From the layout of the website to the different screens within the app, we continually used AI to create interesting and descriptive texts, headlines, subheadings, and calls to action to help everyone envision how our messaging would fit within the different designs. By providing the design, development, and client teams with a more realistic and tangible sense of the space, feel, and layout, we were able to offer a better look at the approach, tone, and length of our desired messaging while providing more effective high-fidelity designs and interactive prototypes.
More with Midjourney
While waiting on final photography, we leveraged Midjourney to create more compelling placeholder images for each mock-up. With thoughtful selections that aligned with each of the themes we were incorporating throughout the app experience, all of the teams involved were able to better visualize how well the photography of the different athletes and locations would interact with our design elements and storytelling. This not only helped to refine the user experience, it allowed the project to move through different rounds of approvals without long delays.
Away We Go
As part of our ongoing support, we’re working closely with Delta and Octagon to expand our list of athletes, teams, and recommendations for each location as each season plays out and more pro athletes travel. From innovative new features to exciting content, we look forward to continuing our successful partnership and helping take fans, new and old, on an unforgettable journey through culture and community.
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