United Airlines
United Careers Site
The United Careers site redesign was part of a broader initiative to transform the United’s hiring process, in response to the increased need for talents to match the company’s growth plan.
Role & Scope
UX Strategy & Delivery Lead: Provided design leadership while partnering with senior IT and HR stakeholders to define scope, align goals, and deliver an external-facing platform that advanced United’s talent growth strategy.
Challenge
The legacy careers site created friction for both candidates and recruiters:
- Outdated UI inconsistent with united.com standards
- Weak employer brand presence — did not reflect United’s values, culture, or benefits
- Lack of mobile optimization, limiting accessibility for modern job seekers
- Fragmented processes that slowed hiring and undermined the larger HR transformation
Strategy
Adopted a Design Thinking approach to align diverse stakeholders and move quickly:
- UX Audit & Benchmarking: Conducted a heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis to highlight gaps and opportunities versus leading career sites.
- Executive Alignment: Facilitated design thinking workshops with 20+ leaders (HR VPs, MDs, Directors, recruiters, IT) to define pain points, prioritize features, and agree on design imperatives.
- Roadmap & Phasing: Identified “quick wins” to deliver immediate improvements while mapping a phased approach for long-term transformation.
- Vendor Collaboration: Partnered closely with the selected vendor, balancing feasibility, cost, and timelines by designing around existing templates without sacrificing UX quality.
Research
Key Research Outcomes
- Defined a feature priority list directly shaped by stakeholder workshops.
- Highlighted candidate needs for mobile-first navigation, clearer branding, and easier application flows.
- Exposed recruiter priorities around content flexibility, role promotion, and streamlined job posting workflows.
Design
Wireframes
Iterated layouts to visually consolidate the prioritized features, ensuring expectations were clear before moving forward.
High Fidelity Designs
Delivered polished mockups aligned with United’s enterprise design system (ATMOS), ensuring consistency with united.com and scalability for future updates.
Outcome
- Launched a modern, mobile-optimized careers site that reflected United’s values and strengthened its employer brand.
- Improved UI, content, and navigation, reducing candidate friction and elevating recruiter efficiency.
- Established a scalable design foundation for ongoing feature rollouts, enabling continuous HR innovation beyond launch.
Leadership Takeaway
This initiative highlights my ability to align executive stakeholders, embed design thinking at scale, and deliver external-facing solutions that not only improve user experience but also advance enterprise-level business goals—in this case, powering United’s talent growth strategy.