American Airlines Rebrand

My first new project as American Airlines UX Manager was the iconic airline's rebrand.  Our team was excited to take on the challenge and institute some long awaited changes to American's home page.  With our new brand voice and visual standards nearing completion, we set out to redesign our home page, corresponding marketing pages, and execute the code needed for both.

Goals

• apply new brand standards to aa.com home page and impact interior pages
• simplify navigation
• improve overall usability
• reduce overall page load
• reduce number of css calls
• deliver design and code on a strict deadline

Process

With most projects, we had a process when beginning new projects.  For the most part, each team would consist of a UX lead, a visual designer, and a developer if necessary.  Given our short notice and time crunch, we decided to handle things a little differently.  We decided to open up wire framing to the entire UX design team.   We set some guidelines and gave our UXD’s and VD’s a week to wire frame a new home page and then held a full day offsite meeting to present ideas.  The goal of this activity was to be inclusive for passionate designers who wanted to help make an impact on the AA rebrand.  In addition, this gave us an opportunity to begin aligning internally and share our ideas with the brand team and their rebrand partner.

We came away with 6 very rough digital wireframes.  The next step was a series of meetings with UXD’s Future Brand, and stakeholders.   With so many different stakeholders, it was difficult to align schedules, so we blocked 2 days and held design workshops with our stakeholders.  Here we held paper prototyping sessions to quickly iterate through stakeholder feedback.

Outcome

Outcome