Metrotwin

British Airways fly a colossal number of people between New York and London every year: the airline is synonymous with the route, having connected the world’s two greatest cities since 1947. We were engaged to develop the service and lead the design, as well as to create the network of bloggers who provide the recommendations in both cities.

Metrotwin is a social utility rather than a social networking site: it’s an online community that treats London and New York as a continuum and it’s aimed at anyone living in or traveling between the two cities who’s struggling to navigate the vast volume of web content about these cities. If you’ve ever tried to use the Web to plan a trip to either city you’ll understand – so many web pages, so little time. These are two of the most written about, blogged about, photographed and videoed pairs of cities anywhere online.

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Twinning: social currency

That idea of twinning got us really excited. When you listen to people explaining the other city to each other you hear it: “What’s the Harvey Nicks of New York?”, “Shoreditch is kinda like Williamsburg…” These are sibling cities – similar yet different. In this weird love:hate rivalry (always respectful, of course) there is real social currency.

Working Agile, we developed the proposition from scratch and designed and built the service in 12 weeks from a standing start. The combined agency/client team practically lived together, not quite in a garage but we did have a dedicated project room. This meant we could work fast, making decisions in real time and working collaboratively. We’ve made a number of subsequent releases – including a Facebook Connect integration (unsurprisingly, these cities are massive on Facebook) and extending the Metrotwin brand into a new market via Metrotwin Mumbai. There’s lots more to come.

Project gallery

Using an iterative and Agile approach, Metrotwin developed very quickly from an initial service idea to production designs. Shown here are some branding sketches, some user journey screens that helped us map a person’s experience of the site, wireframes and finished production designs.