United Airlines is among one of the most widely known American airlines. United serves both domestic and international flights across the United States and the rest of the world. United's goal is to allow their passengers to book flights and travel with confidence.
United Airlines' current website allows its visitors to search, book, and check-in for flights, but the overall design and how these features are being presented is lacking. Compared to direct competitors, the design of United's website could be a lot stronger.
We want to learn what passengers value when searching and booking flights online. We also want to identify the successes and areas of improvement for United Airlines' current site design so that we can iterate its current design and create a responsive set of flows.
The goal of this project was to utilize the company's existing UI and redesign it as needed. There was also a strong emphasis on the mobile web experience and making sure that it functioned well.
Duration: 2 weeks (80 hours)
Role: UI/UX Designer
Tools: Figma, Whimsical
(Disclaimer: This was a fictional project and United Airlines was not a real client)
I began with secondary research to learn more about the airline industry and then put together a competitive analysis. Because I would be focusing on the mobile experience for the scope of my project, I visited the sites of each of these airlines on a mobile device. This gave me a better idea of what the strengths and weaknesses were for each of their mobile sites.
In order to test the existing design of United Airlines' site and unveil its current usability issues, I conducted usability testing with 3 participants. All participants were instructed to access the site with their mobile devices and completed tasks related to searching for and booking flights.
After each session of usability testing, I interviewed participants about their most recent flight booking experience. Participants were asked about what information they find helpful when searching for and booking tickets, how they like to receive confirmation details, and how they prefer to be notified about changes made to their flight.
Using the data collected during usability testing and user interviews, I created a persona that represented a potential user.
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Keeping in mind the persona I made, I created a scenario that would lead to John using United Airlines' mobile platform to search for flights and book a ticket.
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I went for a simplified task flow that showed the main pages involved and the steps/actions taken at each page. This helped me to visually see which pages on United's site I would need to spend more time focusing on.
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During my design process, I focused on the main features necessary to book a trip with United Airlines. Keeping in mind the common issues that I found during my usability testing, I started to sketch and produce designs to provide solutions to those issues. Due to time constraints of this project, I designed primarily mobile screens.
For this project, I did not make any changes to the company's branding or style guides. I made sure to utilize the company's existing UI and to keep the appearance of my redesigns consistent with all the screens involved for searching and booking a flight. For example, at the time of this project, United used purple colored CTA buttons so I also used the same shade of purple whenever there was a CTA or primary button.
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Once I finished designing my mobile screens, I went into a second round of usability testing. The goal of this usability test was to evaluate the effectiveness of the changes I made to United Airlines' site and to see if any additional issues would be discovered as a result of these changes. I made sure to recruit participants who were not part of the initial usability test.
All participants accessed the prototype with their own mobile devices.
These are some of the revisions that I made to my mobile screen designs based off the findings and responses I received from my second round of usability testing.
