During my time with United Airlines, I collaborated with various stakeholders and external parties to bring numerous important enhancements to the Reservation Details experience within our iOS and Android mobile apps.
All United Airline's customers! During the 2023 year-end holiday travel period alone 8.3 Million people were expected to fly with United Airlines.
Sr. UX Designer
Collaborating closely with our Product Owner's and Business Analysts, I worked to redesign the Manage Reservation experience in the app to improve key metrics, address customer feedback, and add delightful functionality. We coordinated with our Test & Learn team to test 5 variants live within the app to demonstrate statistically significant improvements.
Feedback from customers and data from our analytics team indicated that United Airlines customers were struggling to complete important self-service actions, notably changing their seats. In addition, over time multiple teams within United had added new sections and features to the manage reservation page without considering the overall hierarchy and customer experience. As a result key CTA's had been pushed down the page, and design patterns were confusing and inconsistent.
In addition to reviewing data and feedback from customers, I also conducted competitor and peer review of similar reservation management experiences and looked for design patterns across popular apps and on sites like Mobbin.
It was important at this stage that we aligned closely with our Product Stakeholders on goal definition for the project. We identified the following:
One design pattern that we wanted to explore was the "tile" buttons that we had incorporated on the "My United" screen. We also saw similar patterns in use in our peer and competitor review.
I also wanted to experiment with a drawer concept, which we saw in numerous peer and competitor experiences. We had also implemented this in a few places within the United Airlines app like our "Shop By Map" feature and our boarding pass page.
While identifying opportunities to improve the current design, I was also tasked with factoring in future functionality from our Product Roadmap. Notably, we were working with our Contextual Content Engine (CCE) team to implement destination imagery to this experience. We also were looking into giving our customers the ability to rename their trips for another layer of personalization.
We were also in collaboration with Meta to bring a dynamic new way to share an upcoming trip with your friends and family via Instagram and Facebook Stories.
With the project scope and goals now defined, I underwent multiple rounds of design ideation, exploration, and iterations. During this time I regularly received feedback from our internal UX team, our Atmos Team (Design System), as well as product and development stakeholders.
As we progressed through the project, some design patterns began to emerge as favorites and the variants we wanted to test started to solidify.
Working with our Test & Learn team we identified a control and 5 variants for testing. I worked closely with their development team by uploading high-fidelity UI iOS designs into Zeplin, and establishing logic rules and associated designs for various edge cases such as international destinations and contextual updates throughout the travel journey.
In addition to the high fidelity designs I created comprehensive semantic order documentation and partnered closely with our accessibility experts for screen reader instructions.
We ensured that clear eligibility rules and success criteria were established prior to rolling out the Test & Learn experiment. A percentage of iOS customers received one of the five total variants live within the United Mobile app. This experiment continued until statistical significance was established for our primary and secondary criteria.
Variant 2 was the winner! I've outlined the modifications below that this variant introduced, which led to significant improvements to the self service metrics listed above. This variation has also led to an increase in revenue for the "Change seats" flow given its increased prominence on the page. This version of the Manage Reservation experience is now officially live in the United Airlines app for both iOS and Android users.
Due to the significant volume of traffic to the Reservation Details page and its subsequent flows, this was an extremely important project for my professional development. Here are some of the top things I learned during the project:
