Delta Airlines

Background

Delta Air Lines, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful air carriers in the United States. It's ranked as one of the most popular airlines in the US and is known for excellence in everything from passenger experience to customer service, operational performance to workplace culture.

Design Challenge

Since their website was outdated and difficult to navigate, the main task was to create a site that was easy for customers to use to book car rentals.

Design Objective

To understand how to improve the car rental booking process of the Delta Airlines website based on heuristics
Allow users to easily book car rentals by making the site easier to navigate
Create an smooth booking flow for users to rent cars quickly

Market Research Trends

In May 2021, the large airlines carried 30% fewer total passengers, 27% fewer domestic passengers and 51% fewer international passengers than in pre-pandemic May 2019 when there were 81.0 million passengers.
As of May 2021, the number of passengers on commercial flights since May 2020 has increased by 607%.
39% of plans sat idle in 2020, but that number is down to 24% as of May 2021.
Southwest is the most popular airline company, favored by 48% of Americans.
As of 2020, American Airlines is the largest airline company in the US.
Airlines are not predicted to recover to 2019 levels of passenger demand until 2023.
As of 2020, Delta Airlines has the second highest revenue at $17 billion, behind American Airlines at $17.3 billion.
Delta has the third highest RPM (revenue passenger miles) with United and Southwest leading.

Online Presence in the Industry

Southwest.com is ranked number 1 as the most visited Air Travel website in November 2021.
Delta.com ranks in 4th place in the most visited air travel website.
83% of US adults want to book their trips online.

Competitive Analysis

Why Heuristics instead of user interviews?

At its core, Delta's site is very similar to other airlines' sites and gets the job done for many users. However from first glance, I could tell there were some usability issues that could hinder certain users which is an issue since a wide variety of users book travel everyday. I knew that through interviews, I wouldn't be able to gain any feedback with substance that I could use to design an updated site. Participants simply wouldn't be able to point out the usability issues that a UX designer could.
I decided to use the "10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design" from the Nielsen Norman Group to run heuristic testing on the current Delta website and base my design off of my findings.

Visibility of System Status as well as Consistency and Standards

It’s not clear that the page is loading since there’s no animation or wording that indicates that for the user.
Without animation or the word “Loading”, this doesn’t line up with standard practices of websites.

Visual Design

Scale, contrast, and visual hierarchy are poor since the miles promotion has a much higher rank in importance than the actual search function.

User Control and Freedom and Error Prevention

The Checkout Page does not have an obvious and well placed back button.
However it does have a “Keep Shopping” button but it does not warn you that you will lose your spot in the reservation process.