
Transportation
Travel & hospitality
American Airlines + UserTesting
Watch how American Airlines built a benchmarking program to make booking and managing flights easier for customers


About the company
Together with its regional partners and affiliates, American Airlines operates an extensive international and domestic network with thousands of flights per day to more than 350 destinations in more than 60 countries.

Get started now
Contact Sales- 15%Increase to QXscore across the digital experiences that American Airlines has measured and changed
- 37%Rise in task completion rates for inputting passport details, adding loyalty information, requesting a meal, and more
- Key insights regarding how customers like to receive communications + how American can help them book multi-city trips
Most flyers today book online and interact digitally with their airline of choice. Optimizing that digital experience is important for customer satisfaction and retention, particularly for American Airlines, who transports approximately half a million passengers every day and whose website receives hundreds of millions of visitors per year.
American’s digital experiences face a broad audience, to say the least, and the impact of the company’s UX function is difficult to overstate. Still, even as a mature organization with hundreds of thousands of employees around the world, their design org needed a more effective way to quantify, benchmark, share, and show progress related to the product experiences they evaluate. Adding UserTesting to the team’s workflow changed that.
According to Lucas Lemasters, American Airlines’ UX Research Principal, “UserTesting provides us with both the quantitative and qualitative information that we need to make decisions about products.”
The positive impact of UserTesting has been particularly apparent in American’s benchmarking programs. Partnering with UserTesting's Research Consultants, American established QXscore™ as a shared metric to drive product decisions and success. QXscore is a proprietary metric that quantifies how well a person can use a digital experience and how much a person enjoys the experience.

American Airlines put its entire sequence of digital experiences for searching and booking flights in front of potential customers with UserTesting, and then they quantified the usability and enjoyment of their website by QXscoring four key customer experiences:
- Booking a flight
- Changing and managing a flight
- Checking in for a flight
- The AAdvantage program
For the benchmarking programs, they measured the performance of their digital experiences against the same experiences from competing airlines, carefully tracking every conceivable engagement a customer could have when using the American Airlines website.
American’s UX team provides QXscores to the organization’s product owners. This gives the teams a common, quantifiable metric to track success over time. The teams share the related data sets and provide a common set of measures to senior executives, to justify their decisions.
Kimberly Cisek, VP of Customer Experience, says, “Without human insight, you may become reliant on data that is static. What you really want to know is how the customers are using and engaging with the functions that you put out there for them.”

The new insights help to show how qualitative and quantitative measures impact American Airlines’ digital experiences. For instance, when the UX team evaluated the path of customers buying flights, they noticed that people had not booked as many multi-city itineraries as the organization had anticipated. When they reviewed a heat map from their click tests, they noticed that the multi-city search option appeared below the fold on the page. Everyone searched the page at the top, but they struggled to find the multi-city search option.
Insights like these will help American Airlines refine the company’s digital experiences so customers can more intuitively book and manage their flights in the future. And for the digital experiences American has already measured and changed with UserTesting, the company has achieved a 15% average increase in QXscore.
Lucas Lemasters shares, "When we analyzed our experience for changing and managing a flight, we found several key areas where customers were frustrated. They couldn't find where to put passport information, where to add their loyalty account, where to request a meal, or even where to email an itinerary to themselves. When we went back and changed the concepts, we were able to achieve a 37% increase in customer completion rate across all of those tasks."
Human Insight leads to understanding the full end-to-end customer journey to make sure that we have that seamless experience from inspiration and booking, to travel, to when you've arrived at your destination.Kimberly Cisek VP of Customer Experience, American Airlines
The value in providing the QXscore to product owners is that it gives us a common metric with our product counterparts to be able to track success over time.Lucas Lemasters UX Research Principal, American Airlines
Building software is expensive and it takes a long time to get into production. Having insights early is critical to making sure we're as efficient as we can be.Kevin Macfarland Managing Director of Digital Platform and User Experience, American Airlines