Background
United Airlines partnered with renowned designer/developer Brad Frost to create a design system called Atmos then redesigned their consumer facing site to test the new design language.
United Airlines partnered with renowned designer/developer Brad Frost to create a design system called Atmos then redesigned their consumer facing site to test the new design language.
Extend the design language and system to the consumer facing mobile application, for both iOS & Android.
During an initial audit of the mobile app, our team discovered 180 pages across the app. The experience felt dated and complex from a UX perspective. We had 12 weeks to complete the work, delivering against a timeline for United's dev team.
At Huge, we approach all engagements with three phases: Discovery, Design, & Implementation.
For the discovery phase, we plan and align on the scope of work with Product Owners at United. We also held several "deep dive" sessions where we had Product Owners walk us through strategy and design for each of the key pages of the app.
To align on scope of work and existing development timelines, we prioritized pages based on the number of components for each page.
The first task for our design team was to audit the 180 pages of the app, assessing an approximate number of components that make up each page. This assessment eventually helped determine which pages and components will be in review with our weekly sprints.
For the Design phase, we worked within the taxonomy created by the Atmos design system and created a side-by-side comparison of existing Mobile App components with the new style guidelines. As a design team, we considered creating one library for iOS and Android components.
However, we kept component libraries separate between operating systems to 1) accommodate for taxonomy nuances and interaction patterns and 2) align closely with United's development team structure (iOS and Android teams are separate).
For the Implementation phase, our team delivered documentation on how to assemble pages and sketch files of component libraries. We leveraged Leankit for tracking progress, Confluence for documentation, Sketch for iOS and Android component libraries, Abstract for version control, and Zeplin for communication around delivering sketch files.
My role on this project was UX Lead. I lead various planning activities such as design estimations, sprint planning with product management, and aligning technical feasibility with development teams during the 2 week sprints of the design phase.
The mobile app was featured on the popular travel blog, ThePointsGuy.
"With accessibility improvements, a redesigned account page and expanded access to day-of-travel updates, there’s more to love about the United app." - Zack Griff at ThePointsGuy.com
