8 ms·

Response to Dustin Curtis from AA UX person

94 points by ojbyrne 17y ago

sethg 17y ago
At the AA annual shareholder meeting yesterday morning, Mr. Arpey said the company is "taking efforts to improve customer service". I think this is a shortsighted goal. AA should take efforts to improve the whole customer experience. Yes yes yes yes yes. "Customer service" is the backstop to the rest of the customer experience; when a customer has to go to "customer service" to get something done, every other department should see it as their failure. My father recently took a trip on United, and when he was checking in at the airport, the check-in system asked him if he wanted to change his seat. So he did. And after it was too late for him to change back, he discovered that because he had changed into a first-class seat, he was being charged an additional $150. Now, to United's credit, someone at the airport told him who he could email to ask for the charge to be reversed, and when he sent that email he got a prompt response along the lines of "since you did sit in that first-class seat you're not eligible for a refund, but we'll give you your money back anyway". But wouldn't it have been better for everyone concerned if United had designed the workflow on those kiosks so that even a sleep-deprived 70-year-old man in the world's second-busiest airport would not have made that mistake in the first place?
- gfodor 17y ago
  An even better question would be if they had the means to discover, capture, and document his frustration. You can't fix something you can't measure.
  - dcurtis 17y ago
    Ha, that's what I'm working on right now at Frogmetrics.com. We're a YC-funded company, and our goal is to try and help some of these enterprises understand customers better so they can better the customer experience.
  - sethg 17y ago
    Well, the folks at the gate told him he wasn't the first person who had had this problem. So somebody in the bowels of the corporation has discovered that this is not a one-off issue.
zcrar70 17y ago
Welcome to the Real World (Of Large Corporations), Dustin...
- dcurtis 17y ago
  You mean the real world of crappy large corporations. Plenty of large companies are not run this badly. At least I hope they're not.
  - rgrieselhuber 17y ago
    Out of curiosity, what is your experience in producing web content for a site that serves dozens if not hundreds of business requirements at any given time? EDIT: at the scale of a site like AA.com or any global company?
    - dcurtis 17y ago
      I've only done very brief advising to groups in big companies, a long time ago. I've never worked in one. I can't imagine the horror. But it doesn't really matter if the company is big or small, does it? The end result still has to be of some level of quality regardless of the requirements. If something is wrong, there's either a problem on the business side (too many requirements/unfocused goals) or on the design side (bad designers).
      - edw519 17y ago
        "I can't imagine the horror." lol Try to look at it from another perspective. Getting lots of quality work done quickly? Yes, horror. But there are lots of things you encounter in these large organizations you simply don't see elsewhere. In terms of requirements, logistical issues, volumes, people, politics, etc. Once you push the envelope of your personal experience by dealing with these things, you become much better at everything, including lots of stuff you do for small companies. Think of it as practicing basketball with a smaller hoop. I have always oscillated between large and small companies, trying to assimilate the best of both. The battle scars from the horror will probably come in handy later.
edw519 17y ago
"The reason most large companies have bad design is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator." Quite a leap, Dustin, from a company that lost $2 billion last year to "most large companies". Many large companies are in fact run very well. The biggest difference between small and large companies in getting excellent work done? (Broad generalization, of course...) In small companies, problems are more technical; in large companies, problems are more people. As your emailer pointed out, a team of 200 can tackle almost any technical problem, getting it done with all the people and politics is another story. That's why I've always preferred small companies. It's a lot easier to focus on the task at hand.
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Ah, what I meant to say was "The reason big companies with bad design are the way they are is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator."
  - gills 17y ago
    You sort of have a point, but it's not just about the top. Ending up with bad design (be it websites, airplanes, processes, packaging, whatever...) requires the complicity of and/or lack of political aptitude by the folks at the lower levels, "in the trenches" so to speak. One can achieve good design even when the warring factions of management above you can't make it a priority. But it is much more difficult in such an organization, because you must often personally get buy-in from a diverse set of teams and then walk the line with management just right -- pull it off in a way that makes them all look brilliant without stepping on any toes. It can be done but it takes perseverance and political aptitude beyond what most big company employees are willing to commit to their jobs.
karzeem 17y ago
Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy companies are teams of talented individuals. I've had the personal displeasure of booking tickets on AA.com many times in the past year or so. It was so bad, in fact, that every time, I had to call the company to change some details here and there. And uniformly, the people they have working the phones are fantastic. Friendly, helpful in a going-out-of-their-way-to-be-helpful sort of way, and clearly a lot better than the system they're a part of. This letter that Dustin got gives me more confidence that there's something to that observation.
- ojbyrne 17y ago
  I had an over the phone experience with an AA rep recently, and I totally agree. Very helpful, smart and courteous.
- Maciek416 17y ago
  "Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy companies are teams of talented individuals." I agree. I've worked in situations almost exactly like the one described in the reply, and at least one well-known public website redesign that many readers of HN have seen. When I first saw Dustin's rant a few days ago I just shook my head and said "he's probably never worked in a design agency that serves fortune 500 companies where this sort of stuff happens". The amount of political willpower and organizational strength required to pull off a total redesign in most fortune 500 companies or governmental agencies is tantamount to moving mountains. These are the type of organizations and client/agency relationships where the font size on a single button on a form in a "contact us" page can be debated for weeks, where talented designers sit in boardroom conferences till 2AM listening to teams of hundreds of people all throw in their 2 cents instead of actually working on the design that's being discussed. The thing (that you allude to) about the design agencies that get these kinds of contracts that's interesting is that they are full of exactly that: talented fantastically creative individuals. And when a team like the one I worked on finishes a massive redesign that gets covered across the web, there's a feeling of utter failure because the final product that makes it out is never even close to what could have been. Corporate politics reduce it to a mere shadow of that. At the same time, a feeling of relief and accomplishment for having just finished the damned thing and navigated the barbed wire mess of insanity that it takes to deliver such a thing. Next time you see a designer with a multinational bank, airline, consumer products & goods company, automotive company, government agency, etc, in their portfolio, ask about the emotional scars ;).
abi 17y ago
Great article! John Gruber makes a very similar point in his talk "Auteur Theory of Design" [1]. His thesis is that "the quality of any piece of work always approaches that of the decider (i.e the autuer)". Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ
yan 17y ago
Did anyone expect anything else? My default assumption's that behind corporate websites are more-or-less talented people stifled by corporate bureaucracy.
TallGuyShort 17y ago
I think Google is a prime (but rare) example of a large company that has maintained "awesomeness". They encourage creativity, recognize their employees, and focus on providing a good experience to the user. They're not afraid of a big change, so they're able to step back and say, "okay... how should this REALLY work?"
- markessien 17y ago
  There was a comment floating around a few weeks ago about a designer who worked on gmail, and how tough it was to get things to change in google, as regards design.
- mikecuesta 17y ago
  Not according to this man's post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
  - bdotdub 17y ago
    Well, I don't think they had a big stress on design, but they've managed to keep their culture and still keep the bar high. From what I understand, engineers are still king at Google and great ones have freer reign to work on interesting things
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  Based on my Googler and ex-Googler friends, and people they've met from around the country... * Google disrespects designers * Google disrespects founders of acquired products/services * High-ups who hold meetings don't even recognize their lower-level managers who they have tasked with pulling unicorns out of their (lower-level manager) butts -- even after they've succeeded A friend of mine was a web manager who launched 2 or 3 MAJOR projects that got tons of press, in tons of languages, without nearly enough resources - and a certain Google Diva actually asked to have her removed from a relevant meeting to "cut down on guests" I can't wait for the Google hero worship to cease. (PS their NYC office is like a lab rat maze. Shiny colors, sad aura of compressed food pellets and crushed spirits.)
tdonia 17y ago
In my experience, as a UX person in a small agile company that works with lots of large, not-so-agile corporations, i've seen this story over and over again. It's relatively well documented in the field, but broadly, it's a matter of access. the fact that a UX person that's not the CEO responded to this indicates simply that AA is late to the game. The teams we work with may start out that segmented, but usually getting the right experience together means going to the up the corporation's ladder & using that as means to effect the change across all the departments and divisions that have a stake in the experience being developed. More than once this process has (or should) effect the employment in those divisions because most large corporations weren't structured to create the artifacts they are now held to. Along the way, in a successful (read: not doomed) company, executives emerge that are more conscious of the customer's experience. The evolving question is a matter of response time - how quickly can a company adapt to new environments. For AA, it sounds like it'll take a year or more to see significant change. we'll see if that's fast enough. more on this: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise
sanj 17y ago
This reminds me of why I abhor "concept" designs that people photoshop up to look like the next generation iPhone/iPod/Mac/Telsa. They have always struck me as a giant waste of time. Without knowing any of the engineering or business constraints, they're an exercise in academic masturbation. The remind me of drawings I did when I was 6 about my awesome car that did everything: flamethrowers, wings, scuba gear AND 3459798345 miles to the gallon.
- sachmanb 17y ago
  they're still useful. they provide a good exercise for the designer, and although it may not be something that can be implemented/will be implemented they can experiment with ideas and present new patterns or just a particular arrangement of them. design theory work, i suppose, as opposed to designing for implementation.
- raganwald 17y ago
  There are no business constraints. None. That expression is an illusion, a way peopel have of rationalizing their inability to make change. There are no business constraints forcing peopel to make poor decisions. There are just people making poor decisions. In a big company making a collectively poor decision you have a larger aggregate of people making poor decisions. But they are still people making poor decisions, and there are no inviolable constraints, no laws of physics that prevent the company from making good decisions in aggregate. The UX designer says wait 12-18 months for a redesign. Why didn't they redesign the site 12 months ago so we could see it today? One or more poor decisions twelve months ago, that's why. Other companies like ING and Apple get it, which tells me that There are no constraints, no laws, just people who zigged when they should have zagged. If Dustin wants to shout that the emperor has no clothes, I'm happy with your ad hominem suggestion that he's a six-year old boy. Maybe that's what companies like AA need, a little boy to say "You could have everything, happy customers, an understandable web site, AND 3,459,798,345 in profits instead of losses."
  - dangoldin 17y ago
    I'm impressed you went through the steps of adding thousand's separators to his number!
10ren 17y ago
that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great things
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
swombat 17y ago
Seems like a bit of a contrived argument. I think the more plain, more boring, but more realistic explanation is the one given in the letter from X. The reason the website looks like it is is because of the politics involved in building it. When someone has maneuvered the corporate landscape for a year to get a slice of the homepage, you're not going to be able to overrule them just on the fact that "it's bad design". I'll agree that there's something self-destructive about the culture in many large corporations, but I don't think it's entirely down to the CEOs... I believe it's more like a natural emergent quality of large corporations.
zeraholladay 17y ago
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. -- H. L. Mencken
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Great letter by the UX guy, but I feel like Dustin completely missed the point. I know it's tempting to go the 37signals route and turn this isolated example of [what he considers to be] a poor website into a rant on how big businesses just don't get it, have bad taste, hate their customers, etc. The problem is that it's just not true. It might be true for AA, though I'm not convinced, but there are lots of examples out there of big profitable companies with terrible websites that have lots of customers who love them anyway. This whole fiasco feels like another case of a web professional viewing the world from inside their bubble. Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps you're just not in their target market? A lot of people who commented on the last post seem to really like them for frequent business travel...just because they don't cater to the casual market doesn't make them a bad company. On the contrary, focus is good. Oh, and this was my favorite line: Companies like this just float along, in the background of capitalism, exchanging goods and services for money. Yeah...turns out that exchanging goods and services for money is kinda the foreground of capitalism. You might think it's about having a pretty website...it's not.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  Personal anecdote here: I've never had any trouble booking a ticket through AA. Furthermore, the state of the American airline industry is such that nobody flies a "preferred" airline, everyone just flies whatever is cheapest. So, unless your website is actively chasing users away (which I doubt, it's not that poor), you'd be better served keeping your costs down than making some great Web 2.0 gesture of redesign.
  - modoc 17y ago
    Well, maybe not everyone. My two favorite domestic carriers are Virgin America and JetBlue. If I can take one of them to wherever I'm going, I will. Now my liking them isn't based solely on their website design, however I invite you to check out http://www.jetblueairways.com/ http://www.jetblueairways.com/ and http://www.virginamerica.com/ http://www.virginamerica.com/ and compare them to AA.com. The attention to design and customer experience that they show in real life, on the flights, is also exposed on their websites, imho. They're also some of the few profitable US domestic airlines as far as I know.
shalmanese 17y ago
Something I've been advocating for a while to UX people fresh out of school is that the design bit of their job is really the easiest and least important part of what they do. UX is about process which means it's about navigating politics and procuring buy-in and being able to communicate across a broad range of cultures. If you're the only one championing the message of usability & design, then you might get some limited short term success but you will inevitably leave and things will decay back into the ground state. Instead, the correct goal for a UX person should be to instill a culture of usability within a company and act as a facilitator for the people who are building the products. University HCI courses emphasize the technical skills almost exclusively because that's what they're good at but what they end up doing is graduating a bunch of bright, talented people who unfortunately don't have the temperament to play the office politics necessary.
zwieback 17y ago
I'm not so sure I like the airy new iPhone-ified GoogleTwitterGrooveshark style of interface that much better. Maybe AA.com could add that as a front end for simple transaction and have an "Advanced" option to go to the cluttered kind that gives you all the options. Does anyone remember the old SABRE interface travel agents used? They didn't need any colorful icons, just an IBM terminal and a few uppercase letter codes would get you there. Sometimes putting a simple interface onto a complex system is not right for everyone.
- madh 17y ago
  SABRE is moving away from text-based interface to point and click, to the chagrin of many agents.
symptic 17y ago
I think his viewpoint is a tad pretentious, and what we’re seeing here is really a company who is afraid to put itself in a new position, be it out of fear or some sort of analytical paralysis that says if it’s new, it might not work. I think good ‘taste’ comes from a willingness to change--rather, an insistence on change for the better leads to what comes across as tasteful.
ahoyhere 17y ago
The core of this issue: Big[1] companies tend to collapse under their own bureaucracy. Executives either don't really care, don't hear about problems, or don't trust anyone enough to delegate power to someone who would care (or they are incapable of hiring people who do care / are trustworthy) Middle managers don't get rewarded for risks that succeed, they are motivated mostly to CYA Committees are inherently unproductive, and become "scorekeeping grounds" for petty people who are in otherwise denied any power Jobs are staffed with people who won't rock the boat because the reward for rocking the boat doesn't offset the downside of getting fired Everybody down to the "productive" employees (somebody who might actually redesign the site) gets so whipped and dispirited that they tell themselves that this is how The Real World is. Turtles all the way down... apathy, self-deception, excuses, and groupthink. [1] I say big, but at one job, I saw this happening in a team of about 20. It really depends on the individual group's inclination towards buck-passing and bet-hedging

94 points by ojbyrne 17y ago

sethg 17y ago

At the AA annual shareholder meeting yesterday morning, Mr. Arpey said the company is "taking efforts to improve customer service". I think this is a shortsighted goal. AA should take efforts to improve the whole customer experience. Yes yes yes yes yes. "Customer service" is the backstop to the rest of the customer experience; when a customer has to go to "customer service" to get something done, every other department should see it as their failure. My father recently took a trip on United, and when he was checking in at the airport, the check-in system asked him if he wanted to change his seat. So he did. And after it was too late for him to change back, he discovered that because he had changed into a first-class seat, he was being charged an additional $150. Now, to United's credit, someone at the airport told him who he could email to ask for the charge to be reversed, and when he sent that email he got a prompt response along the lines of "since you did sit in that first-class seat you're not eligible for a refund, but we'll give you your money back anyway". But wouldn't it have been better for everyone concerned if United had designed the workflow on those kiosks so that even a sleep-deprived 70-year-old man in the world's second-busiest airport would not have made that mistake in the first place?

gfodor 17y ago
An even better question would be if they had the means to discover, capture, and document his frustration. You can't fix something you can't measure.
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Ha, that's what I'm working on right now at Frogmetrics.com. We're a YC-funded company, and our goal is to try and help some of these enterprises understand customers better so they can better the customer experience.
- sethg 17y ago
  Well, the folks at the gate told him he wasn't the first person who had had this problem. So somebody in the bowels of the corporation has discovered that this is not a one-off issue.

zcrar70 17y ago

Welcome to the Real World (Of Large Corporations), Dustin...

dcurtis 17y ago
You mean the real world of crappy large corporations. Plenty of large companies are not run this badly. At least I hope they're not.
- rgrieselhuber 17y ago
  Out of curiosity, what is your experience in producing web content for a site that serves dozens if not hundreds of business requirements at any given time? EDIT: at the scale of a site like AA.com or any global company?
  - dcurtis 17y ago
    I've only done very brief advising to groups in big companies, a long time ago. I've never worked in one. I can't imagine the horror. But it doesn't really matter if the company is big or small, does it? The end result still has to be of some level of quality regardless of the requirements. If something is wrong, there's either a problem on the business side (too many requirements/unfocused goals) or on the design side (bad designers).
    - edw519 17y ago
      "I can't imagine the horror." lol Try to look at it from another perspective. Getting lots of quality work done quickly? Yes, horror. But there are lots of things you encounter in these large organizations you simply don't see elsewhere. In terms of requirements, logistical issues, volumes, people, politics, etc. Once you push the envelope of your personal experience by dealing with these things, you become much better at everything, including lots of stuff you do for small companies. Think of it as practicing basketball with a smaller hoop. I have always oscillated between large and small companies, trying to assimilate the best of both. The battle scars from the horror will probably come in handy later.

edw519 17y ago

"The reason most large companies have bad design is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator." Quite a leap, Dustin, from a company that lost $2 billion last year to "most large companies". Many large companies are in fact run very well. The biggest difference between small and large companies in getting excellent work done? (Broad generalization, of course...) In small companies, problems are more technical; in large companies, problems are more people. As your emailer pointed out, a team of 200 can tackle almost any technical problem, getting it done with all the people and politics is another story. That's why I've always preferred small companies. It's a lot easier to focus on the task at hand.

dcurtis 17y ago
Ah, what I meant to say was "The reason big companies with bad design are the way they are is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator."
- gills 17y ago
  You sort of have a point, but it's not just about the top. Ending up with bad design (be it websites, airplanes, processes, packaging, whatever...) requires the complicity of and/or lack of political aptitude by the folks at the lower levels, "in the trenches" so to speak. One can achieve good design even when the warring factions of management above you can't make it a priority. But it is much more difficult in such an organization, because you must often personally get buy-in from a diverse set of teams and then walk the line with management just right -- pull it off in a way that makes them all look brilliant without stepping on any toes. It can be done but it takes perseverance and political aptitude beyond what most big company employees are willing to commit to their jobs.

karzeem 17y ago

Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy companies are teams of talented individuals. I've had the personal displeasure of booking tickets on AA.com many times in the past year or so. It was so bad, in fact, that every time, I had to call the company to change some details here and there. And uniformly, the people they have working the phones are fantastic. Friendly, helpful in a going-out-of-their-way-to-be-helpful sort of way, and clearly a lot better than the system they're a part of. This letter that Dustin got gives me more confidence that there's something to that observation.

ojbyrne 17y ago
I had an over the phone experience with an AA rep recently, and I totally agree. Very helpful, smart and courteous.
Maciek416 17y ago
"Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy companies are teams of talented individuals." I agree. I've worked in situations almost exactly like the one described in the reply, and at least one well-known public website redesign that many readers of HN have seen. When I first saw Dustin's rant a few days ago I just shook my head and said "he's probably never worked in a design agency that serves fortune 500 companies where this sort of stuff happens". The amount of political willpower and organizational strength required to pull off a total redesign in most fortune 500 companies or governmental agencies is tantamount to moving mountains. These are the type of organizations and client/agency relationships where the font size on a single button on a form in a "contact us" page can be debated for weeks, where talented designers sit in boardroom conferences till 2AM listening to teams of hundreds of people all throw in their 2 cents instead of actually working on the design that's being discussed. The thing (that you allude to) about the design agencies that get these kinds of contracts that's interesting is that they are full of exactly that: talented fantastically creative individuals. And when a team like the one I worked on finishes a massive redesign that gets covered across the web, there's a feeling of utter failure because the final product that makes it out is never even close to what could have been. Corporate politics reduce it to a mere shadow of that. At the same time, a feeling of relief and accomplishment for having just finished the damned thing and navigated the barbed wire mess of insanity that it takes to deliver such a thing. Next time you see a designer with a multinational bank, airline, consumer products & goods company, automotive company, government agency, etc, in their portfolio, ask about the emotional scars ;).

abi 17y ago

Great article! John Gruber makes a very similar point in his talk "Auteur Theory of Design" [1]. His thesis is that "the quality of any piece of work always approaches that of the decider (i.e the autuer)". Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ

yan 17y ago

Did anyone expect anything else? My default assumption's that behind corporate websites are more-or-less talented people stifled by corporate bureaucracy.

TallGuyShort 17y ago

I think Google is a prime (but rare) example of a large company that has maintained "awesomeness". They encourage creativity, recognize their employees, and focus on providing a good experience to the user. They're not afraid of a big change, so they're able to step back and say, "okay... how should this REALLY work?"

markessien 17y ago
There was a comment floating around a few weeks ago about a designer who worked on gmail, and how tough it was to get things to change in google, as regards design.
mikecuesta 17y ago
Not according to this man's post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
- bdotdub 17y ago
  Well, I don't think they had a big stress on design, but they've managed to keep their culture and still keep the bar high. From what I understand, engineers are still king at Google and great ones have freer reign to work on interesting things
ahoyhere 17y ago
Based on my Googler and ex-Googler friends, and people they've met from around the country... * Google disrespects designers * Google disrespects founders of acquired products/services * High-ups who hold meetings don't even recognize their lower-level managers who they have tasked with pulling unicorns out of their (lower-level manager) butts -- even after they've succeeded A friend of mine was a web manager who launched 2 or 3 MAJOR projects that got tons of press, in tons of languages, without nearly enough resources - and a certain Google Diva actually asked to have her removed from a relevant meeting to "cut down on guests" I can't wait for the Google hero worship to cease. (PS their NYC office is like a lab rat maze. Shiny colors, sad aura of compressed food pellets and crushed spirits.)

tdonia 17y ago

In my experience, as a UX person in a small agile company that works with lots of large, not-so-agile corporations, i've seen this story over and over again. It's relatively well documented in the field, but broadly, it's a matter of access. the fact that a UX person that's not the CEO responded to this indicates simply that AA is late to the game. The teams we work with may start out that segmented, but usually getting the right experience together means going to the up the corporation's ladder & using that as means to effect the change across all the departments and divisions that have a stake in the experience being developed. More than once this process has (or should) effect the employment in those divisions because most large corporations weren't structured to create the artifacts they are now held to. Along the way, in a successful (read: not doomed) company, executives emerge that are more conscious of the customer's experience. The evolving question is a matter of response time - how quickly can a company adapt to new environments. For AA, it sounds like it'll take a year or more to see significant change. we'll see if that's fast enough. more on this: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise

sanj 17y ago

This reminds me of why I abhor "concept" designs that people photoshop up to look like the next generation iPhone/iPod/Mac/Telsa. They have always struck me as a giant waste of time. Without knowing any of the engineering or business constraints, they're an exercise in academic masturbation. The remind me of drawings I did when I was 6 about my awesome car that did everything: flamethrowers, wings, scuba gear AND 3459798345 miles to the gallon.

sachmanb 17y ago
they're still useful. they provide a good exercise for the designer, and although it may not be something that can be implemented/will be implemented they can experiment with ideas and present new patterns or just a particular arrangement of them. design theory work, i suppose, as opposed to designing for implementation.
raganwald 17y ago
There are no business constraints. None. That expression is an illusion, a way peopel have of rationalizing their inability to make change. There are no business constraints forcing peopel to make poor decisions. There are just people making poor decisions. In a big company making a collectively poor decision you have a larger aggregate of people making poor decisions. But they are still people making poor decisions, and there are no inviolable constraints, no laws of physics that prevent the company from making good decisions in aggregate. The UX designer says wait 12-18 months for a redesign. Why didn't they redesign the site 12 months ago so we could see it today? One or more poor decisions twelve months ago, that's why. Other companies like ING and Apple get it, which tells me that There are no constraints, no laws, just people who zigged when they should have zagged. If Dustin wants to shout that the emperor has no clothes, I'm happy with your ad hominem suggestion that he's a six-year old boy. Maybe that's what companies like AA need, a little boy to say "You could have everything, happy customers, an understandable web site, AND 3,459,798,345 in profits instead of losses."
- dangoldin 17y ago
  I'm impressed you went through the steps of adding thousand's separators to his number!

10ren 17y ago

that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great things

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

swombat 17y ago

Seems like a bit of a contrived argument. I think the more plain, more boring, but more realistic explanation is the one given in the letter from X. The reason the website looks like it is is because of the politics involved in building it. When someone has maneuvered the corporate landscape for a year to get a slice of the homepage, you're not going to be able to overrule them just on the fact that "it's bad design". I'll agree that there's something self-destructive about the culture in many large corporations, but I don't think it's entirely down to the CEOs... I believe it's more like a natural emergent quality of large corporations.

zeraholladay 17y ago

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. -- H. L. Mencken

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

Great letter by the UX guy, but I feel like Dustin completely missed the point. I know it's tempting to go the 37signals route and turn this isolated example of [what he considers to be] a poor website into a rant on how big businesses just don't get it, have bad taste, hate their customers, etc. The problem is that it's just not true. It might be true for AA, though I'm not convinced, but there are lots of examples out there of big profitable companies with terrible websites that have lots of customers who love them anyway. This whole fiasco feels like another case of a web professional viewing the world from inside their bubble. Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps you're just not in their target market? A lot of people who commented on the last post seem to really like them for frequent business travel...just because they don't cater to the casual market doesn't make them a bad company. On the contrary, focus is good. Oh, and this was my favorite line: Companies like this just float along, in the background of capitalism, exchanging goods and services for money. Yeah...turns out that exchanging goods and services for money is kinda the foreground of capitalism. You might think it's about having a pretty website...it's not.

potatolicious 17y ago
Personal anecdote here: I've never had any trouble booking a ticket through AA. Furthermore, the state of the American airline industry is such that nobody flies a "preferred" airline, everyone just flies whatever is cheapest. So, unless your website is actively chasing users away (which I doubt, it's not that poor), you'd be better served keeping your costs down than making some great Web 2.0 gesture of redesign.
- modoc 17y ago
  Well, maybe not everyone. My two favorite domestic carriers are Virgin America and JetBlue. If I can take one of them to wherever I'm going, I will. Now my liking them isn't based solely on their website design, however I invite you to check out http://www.jetblueairways.com/ http://www.jetblueairways.com/ and http://www.virginamerica.com/ http://www.virginamerica.com/ and compare them to AA.com. The attention to design and customer experience that they show in real life, on the flights, is also exposed on their websites, imho. They're also some of the few profitable US domestic airlines as far as I know.

shalmanese 17y ago

Something I've been advocating for a while to UX people fresh out of school is that the design bit of their job is really the easiest and least important part of what they do. UX is about process which means it's about navigating politics and procuring buy-in and being able to communicate across a broad range of cultures. If you're the only one championing the message of usability & design, then you might get some limited short term success but you will inevitably leave and things will decay back into the ground state. Instead, the correct goal for a UX person should be to instill a culture of usability within a company and act as a facilitator for the people who are building the products. University HCI courses emphasize the technical skills almost exclusively because that's what they're good at but what they end up doing is graduating a bunch of bright, talented people who unfortunately don't have the temperament to play the office politics necessary.

zwieback 17y ago

I'm not so sure I like the airy new iPhone-ified GoogleTwitterGrooveshark style of interface that much better. Maybe AA.com could add that as a front end for simple transaction and have an "Advanced" option to go to the cluttered kind that gives you all the options. Does anyone remember the old SABRE interface travel agents used? They didn't need any colorful icons, just an IBM terminal and a few uppercase letter codes would get you there. Sometimes putting a simple interface onto a complex system is not right for everyone.

madh 17y ago
SABRE is moving away from text-based interface to point and click, to the chagrin of many agents.

symptic 17y ago

I think his viewpoint is a tad pretentious, and what we’re seeing here is really a company who is afraid to put itself in a new position, be it out of fear or some sort of analytical paralysis that says if it’s new, it might not work. I think good ‘taste’ comes from a willingness to change--rather, an insistence on change for the better leads to what comes across as tasteful.

ahoyhere 17y ago

The core of this issue: Big[1] companies tend to collapse under their own bureaucracy. Executives either don't really care, don't hear about problems, or don't trust anyone enough to delegate power to someone who would care (or they are incapable of hiring people who do care / are trustworthy) Middle managers don't get rewarded for risks that succeed, they are motivated mostly to CYA Committees are inherently unproductive, and become "scorekeeping grounds" for petty people who are in otherwise denied any power Jobs are staffed with people who won't rock the boat because the reward for rocking the boat doesn't offset the downside of getting fired Everybody down to the "productive" employees (somebody who might actually redesign the site) gets so whipped and dispirited that they tell themselves that this is how The Real World is. Turtles all the way down... apathy, self-deception, excuses, and groupthink. [1] I say big, but at one job, I saw this happening in a team of about 20. It really depends on the individual group's inclination towards buck-passing and bet-hedging