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Creating Controversy for its own Sake (AA.com redesign fiasco)

210 points by antidaily 17y ago

radley 17y ago
Serious irony...
wmeredith 17y ago
I'm glad someone wrote this. Dustin Curtis is an ass. An insightful ass, but an ass all the same. Maybe there's no such thing as bad publicity; but while I'll keep reading his blog, I'd hate to work with him. I like his website, but his hubris is monstrous. Anyone can crank out a clean design in a few hours when they're working with no specs, business goals, market research, investors or actual customers to answer to. (I liked his AA.com design, but it was one page deep and dumped critical parts of the original's site map.) As for the guy getting canned and the faux 'net outrage, gimme a break. He should've known better. Fortune 500 companies that employ tens of thousands of people aren't known for deviating from policies as basic as you keep your mouth shut about the inner workings of the company in a published public forum.
- jmtame 17y ago
  i have heard bad things about dustin curtis from friends of mine.. i find it ironic that he's criticizing the moral scruples of others when he has several of his own.
  - jmtulloss 17y ago
    And now you're doing so publicly without actually bringing up any facts? Poor form.
    - jmtame 17y ago
      it's personal, i'm not going into detail. he ripped someone off, and if he wanted to fix it he could. but he chooses not to, and criticizes others for their behaviors. i just find that to be pretty hypocritical.
      - dcurtis 17y ago
        Hey, please email me: hi@dustincurtis.com .
        diN0bot 17y ago
        jmtame's email is in his profile. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmtame http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmtame (no need to keep making public statements...)
        daleharvey 17y ago
        I think its perfectly acceptable to make a public statement when you have been publicly accused of ripping people off
        zackattack 17y ago
        I think people should upvote jmtame. He probably wouldn't have gotten any response from Dustin Curtis unless he leveraged the threat of public embarrassment. Similarly, whenever I see a bemmu thread, I point out that he owes me $20, because the only way to bring him out of the woodwork is through social shaming.
        jmtame 17y ago
        to follow up with all of this: this whole thing got sorted out shortly after bringing it up. seems like it was a misunderstanding on both sides. cheers!
      - jmtulloss 17y ago
        I'm not saying you don't have a reason to be angry at the guy, I'm just saying that an opaque comment questioning somebody's character in a public forum is not appropriate.
        jmtame 17y ago
        the reason i brought it up here was because he has ignored e-mails in the past. why would he respond to one of my e-mails if he ignored someone else's? he is responding to mine now, and if he makes things right (which he says he is trying to do now), it will have turned out to be a big misunderstanding and i will gladly take back my negative opinion towards him.
- jeremymims 17y ago
  Wade, After reading this original blog post you wrote, I think it's a bit of a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The only difference is Ford intervened to stop a PR disaster and AA fanned the flames. I know you're well intentioned, but there's no need to resort to name calling. http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/12/pr-disaster-ford-suing-people-who-about-ford-cars/ http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/12/pr-disaster-ford-sui...
  - davidw 17y ago
    Yes, let's please keep in mind the idea that you'd be comfortable saying what you're writing in your comments directly to someone's face.
    - wmeredith 17y ago
      I am. I was actually assuming that Dustin would read that when I wrote it. (He's posted here before in response to linked articles.) It's OK if he knows I think his writing style makes him look like an ass. I suspect he won't care or more likely already knows it, he's not dumb. Most people that have been publishing anything online that's even remotely well read gets a thick skin or gives up fast.
  - wmeredith 17y ago
    I claimed no superiority over Dustin Curtis in action or demeanor. And I'll stand behind that article I wrote about Ford. It's ludicrous for a company to sue their own fan base. And the second it was found out that was not the case, I started working with both Ford and Scott Monty to get their side of the story out within minutes. (Read the linked article for context.)
- mustpax 17y ago
  In that case, I don't understand why we are celebrating the soul-crushing mediocrity of these Fortune 500 companies. If anything Mr. X's letter made AA look pretty good, and I fail to see what super-secret strategic plans he was airing either. Companies are run by people, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to make rational decisions that treat their employees with dignity. Dustin might be brash, but he is pointing out obvious problems. It makes no sense to bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer.
  - itistoday 17y ago
    > In that case, I don't understand why we are celebrating the soul-crushing mediocrity of these Fortune 500 companies. I think that bears repeating.
    - DanielStraight 17y ago
      It bears repeating several times. This is more about a clash of cultures than anything else.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    Dustin might be brash, but he is pointing out obvious problems. It makes no sense to bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer. If you're trying to get something useful done, the point isn't to be right, but rather, to convince others of your position. If you're trying to draw attention to yourself at the cost of others, ranting publicly is a fine strategy. To quote the original article: Fire your entire design team, if you have one. Hire an outside design firm ... as quickly as possible. Your in-house team is obviously incapable of building a good experience. It's this brazen self-promotion and a lack of maturity and decorum that causes individuals to "bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer".
    - sineltor 17y ago
      the point isn't to be right, but rather, to convince others of your position. Correct. However, he’s not really trying to convince AA to change their strategy. He’s trying to convince us that AA’s strategy is dumb. Because user interface design is important, and its not ok to foul it up. If the best way to do that is by brashly pointing out AA’s mistakes, so be it. I tip my hat to Dustin for fighting the good fight.
- rantfoil 17y ago
  Hubris? Hubris is a loaded term that is purely subjective. He's one of the most talented designers I know, and he deserves to speak strongly. Humility doesn't need to enter here. A humble designer is one who affects no change indeed. Designers should be less humble. When engineers or business guys or management or anyone makes a product lousier, they should get up and shout, and raise hell. Apple wins because the guy who cares the most about user experience happens to run the show. And last I checked, humble wasn’t really a word you could use to describe him.
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  - tbrooks 17y ago
    You are equating humility to being an ass-kisser. You can be humble and raise some hell; people will respect you for it. If you're a dick about things, people will soon learn to ignore you. You can dissent and be humble - the two are not mutually exclusive.
    - rantfoil 17y ago
      In the glory days of Microsoft (circa Windows 95), the company culture was very different than in the Ballmer Administration. There used to be a class called 'Precision Questioning' that was specifically about being very efficient at asking very pointed, very direct questions. To the uninitiated, it came across as incredibly rude and disrespectful. But it was effective. Things got done fast, and BS was caught immediately, because the questions that got asked were rude, disrespectful, but vitally needed to make the right decisions. It cut through to the truth as quickly as possible. I think there's something happening here -- being direct and truthful hurts, but to create great things, you have to set aside feelings. Since Ballmer took over the reigns, Microsoft no longer teaches this course to its managers. Kinder and gentler, he said -- but there's a very real cost to kinder and gentler.
      - tbrooks 17y ago
        Microsoft's success (and failure in many areas) extends beyond communication styles. In part, Microsoft developed a "we know best" culture that fails to see both opportunities and hazards. Being so inwardly focused creates a low sense of urgency. Obviously AA and other large corps face the same problem. Still, it is possible have direct/pointed discussions and maintain humility. Take Zappos for example. Two of Zappos core values are 9.Be Passionate and Determined and 10.Be Humble. The two are not in conflict with each other. They've done well, as has Chick-fil-A - another large company that esteems humility.
- kyro 17y ago
  Right, and yet, even with tens of comments here, triggered by Dustin's posts, about how utterly crappy AA's experience is, we shouldn't criticize AA because that's just how big companies are. JetBlue is concerned with all the same factors you listed, and they're great. His posts resulted in a lot people vocalizing their poor experiences with AA. That's what's important, regardless of how he expressed it. I'd say that the harsh way he delivered his message really helped people in expressing their opinions. HN seems a lot softer than I expected.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Softer? Ha, you're mischaracterizing this reaction. We got to be assholes towards American Airlines three times in a row, and now we get to insult the other side. Expect more insulting of AA in the future, too. Though that's tongue-in-cheek, there's a serious cause behind it, which is that we have a community big enough and smart enough to argue both sides. Depending on the source of the article we're commenting on, one side is always louder than others. So on Steve Jobs Is Best CEO, we get more pro-Apple, and on Apple Censored Me, we get more anti-Apple. Smart people on both sides, but each one focusing on a different story. So there're people here who hate AA's site and there're people who think Dustin is pretending a wisdom he doesn't have, and both those people get a place to place their beliefs. I think that's healthy for the community. It lets lurkers see both sides of the discussion. I fear when we become like r/politics on Reddit, where only one side dominates.
    - kyro 17y ago
      Yeah, I get that. People here are just taking cheap shots based on their belief that because Dustin hasn't worked at a big company, his opinion and demand for a better product are invalid. I wonder if people would have said the same had it been a 50yr. old expressing his frustrations just as aggressively. The argument that you need to know about big company to understand why their products are the way they are is a stupid one. I'm sure the majority of AA customers are a lot less knowledgeable than Dustin about these types of things. I guess that makes them more ignorant, which, by people's argument here, should mean they are in a lesser place to express their disappointment. But in reality, they're a customer. Their opinion matters just as much. Also, for the highest voted comment here to open up with "Dustin is an ass" shows that this is far from civilized and intelligent conversation. He's not being judged on the merits of his work, but rather on a personal level. That's low. You idiot. :P
txxxxd 17y ago
This author undervalues criticism. Being polite is not always the most effective way to create change.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  it depends on what kind of change you want and at what cost. great changers focus so purely on the matter at hand that they do not let their causes get dragged down by insults or violence. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr come to mind. ps - "I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it." a little humility goes a long way. defensiveness and pigheadedness are quite different from intention and stance. passion is different than fighting everyone. making friends and spreading passion might even be more effective.
dcurtis 17y ago
I agree with a lot of the points in this article. Yes, my original letter to AA was, admittedly, a bit vitriolic. But I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it. I'm a designer and an entrepreneur. I'm passionate about great user experiences. I think fighting for great user experiences from companies is a good thing. What is passion if you don't fight for what you love? We're on the cusp of a changing society. Customer experience is becoming, in a very literal way, the brand of a company. And when I come across companies so clueless that they won't spend 50k to hire a design firm to design their online identity/experience, I can't help but wonder what kind of negative effect that has on the evolution of the internet and on customer experience design as an industry. Fixing AA.com would be [strike]ridiculously[/strike] relatively cheap and simple, especially if it was just a new skin based on the logic they already have built (even though there are serious flaws there as well). Yet the company has not done this. It hasn't even hinted at this, and it fired the one guy who seemed to care about it in the organization. This is a management problem, not a design problem. When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid. But I honestly believe the fault for a failing like this, a failing so visceral that it affects the image of the entire company in the eyes of its customers, rests solely in lap of the CEO. American Airlines is no doubt a terrible company, and not just from a design perspective. The culture there is broken, the "business" is failing (it loses billions of dollars a year), and the majority of customers hate the experience. Something is wrong. Bringing attention to it, I think, can't possibly be a bad thing.
- dannyr 17y ago
  Dustin, It is always easy to say that things are easy to fix on an outsider's perspective. In reality, it isn't. I have worked for a big company before and changing things, even the obvious ones, are often difficult. You may not like the user experience of the site but it is possible that conversion is still high. There is definitely management problem based on their finances. Redesigning their site may not be in their top priority now.
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lionhearted 17y ago
This seems like a little cognitive dissonance to me: > So where does that leave us? A 21-year-old wrote a blog post. A guy broke the corporate rules and got fired. The internet (and the blogger!) is outraged. > But the web will still be full of arrogant, uninformed, polarizing, self-promoting, controversy-creating content that has ramifications no one wants to own up to. And consequently, the web will still be lacking in common courtesy, humility, and the admittance that most of us don’t know best. Which is sad, mostly because it’s true. What irony! The So Serious guy is calling out others on being not courteous and not humble in a discourteous, unhumble guy.
- pyre 17y ago
  Not even that, he's fueling the controversy that he's criticizing by writing this article.
- tbrooks 17y ago
  Really? How is Joshua's position arrogant and discourteous? He never attacks Dustin as a person. He calls Dustin's methods and actions into question. I fail to see the irony in this...
  - ellyagg 17y ago
    For one, he repeatedly makes a point of dcurtis' age. That's not really appropriate.
    - unalone 17y ago
      It is if part of his point's that the Internet's letting itself get worked up over what a not-completely-mature kid said. The fact that Hacker News and other sites have had this raging debate over Dustin's writing belies the fact that basically he's a college student mouthing off a big company, and that we're assuming against the odds that he knows more than an industry professional does. At that point it's absolutely appropriate to remind us of who Dustin is.
nzmsv 17y ago
OK, I get the point about being nice, but the AA.com design is ugly. I'm sure as a giant company AA is used to criticism. There are many big companies with sites not only ugly, but unusable. For example, Rogers.com (Canada's cell phone almost-monopoly). Half the site (the account management interface) seems not to work with anything except IE6. Are the people responsible for that abomination incompetent? I'd say so. But we are all supposed to be nice to the slow big companies and not talk about it on the Internet :)
cj 17y ago
Controversy? I'd call it holding people accountable for their actions. AA has a terrible website and their employees know it. Mr. X shared "corporate secrets" and got fired for it. AA fired an (seemingly excellent) employee for no substantial reason. Dustin got called out for shoving a design in a companies's face. Holding people accountable is respectable. And for that, I respect. I respect you and Dustin. Accountability is a rare bird these days indeed.
ratsbane 17y ago
I'm sure the "Creating Controversy..." writer has some reasonable points. Perhaps Dustin Curtis really is only fourteen years old and is a frightful bounder who drops his aitches and has cocoa and bloaters for supper.* But really, Dustin Curtis makes some good points. The reason sites like AA's are so much worse than they could be is precisely because of bloated and poorly-organized infrastructure and competing interests. That excuse isn't going to stop customers from going to better, more easily-navigable sites if they have a choice. I have bought plane tickets more than once from airline B instead of airline A just because I couldn't get what I needed on airline A's site. About a year ago USAirways.com charged me eight times for the same flight and never sent an e-ticket. I don't buy from them any more. If I can't find and buy the best flight from airline A because their web site doesn't work well it's the same result to me as if they don't have that flight. Look at how much more market value has been created by companies like Kayak.com who have used a lot less resources to create a much more effective buying experience than the most of the big lumbering airlines. Their gain has come about because the airlines have not been able to overcome their organizational problems. Also, what Mister X* wrote was quite tactful. While it acknowledged some internal problems at AA (which certainly are obvious anyway) it did so in a very graceful way and provide a pretty good counter-argument. It was about the best statement American Airlines could have hoped anyone would have put out in response to Dustin Curtis' piece. You might argue that they were justified in firing him. You might be right (and you might not) but they were also very clearly very stupid to fire him. Had they merely given him a mild rebuke and then promoted him then they could have maintained control over what has turned into a small scandal for AA. Instead, he's no longer bound to watch his words so carefully. I hope he'll have more to say. So if Dustin Curtis really does chew broken bottles and turn into a werewolf at the time of the full moon* that's too bad. All I know about him is that he seems like a pretty decent designer who has strong opinions and isn't afraid to voice them but who probably hasn't read Frederick Brooks. Maybe if someone upstairs at AA had an attitude like Dustin Curtis and Mister X I wouldn't be putting them on my list of "companies to avoid doing business with whenever there's a reasonable alternative." * P.G Wodehouse "Service With a Smile" * Why does this name make me think of "For British Eyes Only..." * Another P.G. Wodehouse reference I can't place.
madair 17y ago
Corporations are so very dehumanizing. The good of the few shareholders at the expense of the human experience for the individuals who labor typically a minimum of 1/2 of their waking hours but are summarily fired if they so much as speak their mind. We've accepted this system. Many people at this site will vote me down for questioning the good of the corporate body over the good of the individual. Many will simply vote me down just because it was in the poor guy's contract. But the bottom line is that American Airlines fires people who try to reasonably speak their mind. Simple as that. And the people who vote down against the good of people in favor of the good of the corporate body are the enemy.
- philwelch 17y ago
  For the record, I almost voted you down because when I read things like "many people at this site will vote me down", I take it as a dare. Your point is no weaker if you leave out the baiting and reverse psychology.
  - madair 17y ago
    It's not reverse psychology. It's my disappointment at this public forum when it collectively decides something is too far out of the norm of opinion.
    - Pahalial 17y ago
      You could easily have phrased that to avoid coming across as reverse psychology - "Since when is HN so defensive of <bigco policy> and shareholder interests at the detriment of users" etc - as a few other posts in this thread have done. Note how most of them are not tremendously downvoted. You, on the other hand, mention voting down your post three times in a single paragraph, each time attacking potential reasons - not covering every reason of course, only the ones that everyone sane should agree are Bad Things. Philosophy class is a bit far now, but isn't this a classic red herring? "And the people who vote down against the good of people in favor of the good of the corporate body are the enemy." Clearly meant to make people think that if they vote you down they are the enemy of the Good of the People, rather than letting them form their own responses based on the merits of your argument. Bullshit rhethoric likes this is what has no place here. Discuss the facts or the ethics of matters as you will, but please leave karma-baiting rhethoric out of your posts.
marcusbooster 17y ago
I'm tired of this meme of unsolicited and superficial redesigns of Company X's front page. I understand this economy is tough for designers and there's not a lot of portfolio jobs around, but I think it's more impressive to design for a little nonsense webapp that actually does something. At the very least if would demonstrate you can take something from Photoshop into the real world.
- djb_hackernews 17y ago
  I've spammed my twitter app enough to get feedback, but one thing I was hoping to get when I posted it to HN was some design critiques. If someone wants to put a design together for it check my past submissions for the link and email me.
kyro 17y ago
This article is outright stupid. Let's say for a second that Dustin really is a ridiculously ignorant designer (he's not) - who gives a crap? He's a customer who is really displeased not only with the AA website but with the total experience. And the majority of the comments on the other submissions were about how even people here hated the company, before you found out about the firing of Mr. X. Ignorant, fine. Harsh, fine. You guys are getting caught up in criticizing Dustin because it's the easiest thing to do. It's weird how all you anti bigco people are so riled up in the way someone expressed their poor customer experience and overlooking the fact that AA fired an employee trying to reach out. I know it violated the contract, whatever, but that just shows us where AA's mind is. Mr. X didn't say anything that made me look down upon AA. We know big companies run slowly, that's a constant. I doubt there's one person out there who read Mr. X's statement and learned something uniquely bad about AA that they didn't know of before. If anything, it made them look more humane. You're right though, a 21 year old's ignorance is the real issue here. Forget widespread displeasure with AA, or the fact that they fired an employee for personally reaching out to a customer that else wouldn't have been reached out to, it's the arrogance that really kills you.
- unalone 17y ago
  Oy, Kyro. Usually I side with what you've got to say but this time I think you're in the wrong. > Let's say for a second that Dustin really is a ridiculously ignorant designer (he's not) He is in that he's never worked for a major company in a design position. > He's a customer who is really displeased not only with the AA website but with the total experience. I've had to deal with customers before. I've had customers tell me to fire everybody in a movie theatre for incompetence. Usually we pretend like we care in front of them, then roll our eyes once they're gone. > And the majority of the comments on the other submissions were about how even people here hated the company, before you found out about the firing of Mr. X. There was just as much criticism before. The summary of mass opinion is: We hate American Airlines and their design, but the issue has been oversimplified here. > I know it violated the contract, whatever, but that just shows us where AA's mind is. Mr. X didn't say anything that made me look down upon AA. The deal is when you sign an agreement, you follow it. What if Mr. X had been an Apple employee leaking a new product? That's what he did here. Perhaps not as severely, but it's the same corporate crime. And his response let Dustin write a second article bashing people at American Airlines, so it invited even more bad PR. > If anything, it made them look more humane. Mr. X was paid to design web sites. AA has other people who're meant to make them look humane. Right now they're sucking, but it's sound in theory because it lets everybody know what they're supposed to do. It works well for other companies. AA is bad, but they won't fix the problem by growing laxer.
muhfuhkuh 17y ago
All this for what basically amounts to the flickr homepage flipped horizontally and an extra text box added? Dustin Curtis doesn't seem very creative to me.
- scotty79 17y ago
  Mr. X got fired because Dustin published his email. What reasonable man could publish somebody's email in which author bitches about his corporate workplace and expect not to get him fired by this? Corporations perceive them selves as saint. If anyone complains about the smell in their cathedral he gets kicked out. You can probably get away with such offense if you are customer but never if you are employee. Another question is: Is money worth so much to justify visiting such smelly place daily?
angusdavis 17y ago
I have two stories to add to this discussion, although perhaps this discussion does not need more fuel to the fire. First, when I was 21 (in 1999), I was the founder of my last startup, Tellme. So I have been a young entrepreneur. Second, one of Tellme's customers (in 2002) was American Airlines. So I understand how they work and the challenges they face. At Tellme, we built a lost baggage voice application for AA. They figured if we could make their 800 number keep customers happy when the airline lost your bag, we'd be able to do a decent job on the rest of their apps. I'm proud to say that today Tellme answers every call to American Airlines, but back to lost bags. In the course of building that initial application, I learned things like: airlines issue a ticket number, a PNR, a bag tracking number and a lost bag ID to customers. These numbers are all different and customers don't know which is which. I also learned that at that time, American could not pull up a list of reservations (PNRs) based on your Frequent Flyer number, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary that year. Finally, I learned that passenger names for the lost bags database contained only the first 8 characters of a passenger's last name. Projects were underway with major subcontractors such as Sabre and EDS at that time to resolve and improve some of these issues. But the point is, big companies have complex systems. Some of these things were unbelievably bad at first glance to a tech guy like me, but they were all there for a reason. We also take for granted the fact they manage the incredible operational logistics of taking off a few thousand airplanes and moving millions of people around at 500+ mph in the air every year -- not too shabby! So my takeaway #1 is that it is far too easy for geeks, especially inexperienced geeks, to bash the complexities of big enterprises. At Tellme, we were successful by working within the constraints we had. For the lost bags app, we figured a consumer would never know which bag ID or ticket number we were asking for, so we built an app that found the user's lost bag record by asking the caller for 1) city where bag was reported lost; 2) date of loss and 3) last name of the passenger. Since the last names in the lost bags database contained only the first 8 characters of a user's last name, we used the US Census database of all names to automatically expand all 8-character last names into all the possible last names (e.g. Williams would be expanded to also include Williamson, etc., as a possible match). Throughout our deployment and work with AA, I became really impressed with the talent and dedication of their employees. A woman I worked with closely wore a necklace with a charm she had been awarded for 15 years of loyal service to the company. In 2002 the company was 4 months post-9/11 and to see the people there move full speed ahead on new applications amidst the greatest challenge to their existence in the history of their industry -- not to mention a national tragedy -- was inspiring. Second, I was a 21-year old entrepreneur once. I was brash, insensitive, and abrasive. I grew up an only child. You do the math. At times I made cynical remarks that were not helpful. I was smart, and I seldom doubted my own opinions. As my mother would say, "Often wrong, but seldom in doubt." One of the folks on our founding team suggested I read Dale Carnegie. Another gave me the Steven Covey book. In the end I became a more effective communicator not just from reading books but by growing a little older. Yes, Dustin's remarks about AA where he paints them as some sort of completely incompetent idiots are wholly inappropriate and abrasive and unfair. I think that's in large part because the guy is 21. I also understand that designers can be an especially opinionated bunch. Of course, this type of vitriol is not limited to youth. For example, folks on one end of the political spectrum or the other often refer to Nancy Pilosi or George Bush with disdain that ignores the humanity of these individuals. Whether due to youth or passion, people lose their perspective, and when we do this, our message gets lost in the heat of its delivery. My recommendations would be to try to put yourself in the shoes of the guy you're criticizing. You can be frank in your criticism, but you don't need to be callous. It gets easier with age. I'm still to this day critical of some things, and often I am passionate about those opinions, but it's possible to be a passionate critic without coming off as a jerk. It's something I work at all the time. It's also possible to be an airline and have a good web site. As an American Airlines customer, I hope they improve a lot in that area soon, as Virgin America is definitely setting the bar today for in-air customer experience, and neither has a particularly great Web site. Yet.
scotty79 17y ago
It's actually quite funny that they fired him for violation of NDA. It's like an old joke that someone got punished for disclosing military secrets after he said that general is stupid.
apsec112 17y ago
"It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function." Wait... what? None of this makes much sense at all. "Metrics"? Metrics for what? A metric is just a way of measuring things. What are we measuring? Pixels? Number of visitors? Number of bytes transferred? "Creative direction"? Again, what does that mean, exactly? It's an airline website. It's supposed to be elegant and functional, not a work of postmodernist art. "Business acumen"? Business = getting people to pay you, and people will be more inclined to pay you, all other things being equal, if your website is better designed. Is there some reason why a website redesign would cause AA to lose money? The cost of designing a website is trivial, in comparison to AA's annual budget of $22,935,000,000. "Sales experience"? "Sales" usually means selling things to people in person, or over the phone, which is a very different business from designing a website to sell people things (ask anyone who's done both). "Actual functionality" is the only legitimate criticism here. It's quite a bit harder to make a website that actually works than to draw it. "Enterprise scale" is a myth. Justin.TV, according to their website, currently has 29 employees (including the founders). Justin.TV's Alexa rank is #222. American Airlines has 85,500 employees, and their website is less popular (rank #1,465), and almost certainly requires less bandwidth and storage space to boot. I won't comment on whether the guy is or isn't a jerk, but the ability to spit out a long list of fancy words ("metrics"? Come on) does not a legitimate criticism make.
metalab 17y ago
My Comment to Joshua: I appreciate what you're saying here, but I think you're mischaracterizing the point of both of our articles. Neither of us proposed our mockups as comprehensive redesigns or attempted to address anything past the basic visuals. I wanted to buy shoes, and I found it to be a really frustrating experience, so I said something. If the door to a retail store is hard to open and you complain about it, does it make you an arrogant prick for failing to think through all the potential reasons for the problem? Maybe the company handyman only comes every two weeks. Maybe there's a mountain of paperwork required before any repairs can be made. Maybe the staff needs approval from management. Does that make your frustration with the door situation any less relevant? It definitely makes you empathize with the staff, and speaks volumes about the company's ineffective management, but that doesn't change the fact that the door is really hard to open, and this is a problem for you as well as other customers. Understanding the context is important, but it doesn't make our critiques any less relevant. You argue that, "it’s easy to 'design' when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality". Of course, but think about all the companies that manage to get it right. Huge, lumbering corporations like Amazon, JetBlue, and Virgin all manage to pull off great user experience despite facing the same challenges. Why shouldn't Zappos and American Airlines be held to the same standard? I found the Zappos website insanely frustrating to use, so I spent an evening identifying some of the problems I spotted and added a mockup to clarify. Yes, I was a little inflammatory, but the overarching message was a positive one. I wasn't trying to tell them how to sell shoes or reinvent their business - my article was intended to show how a few simple changes overtop of the existing website could help make it easier to use. Blurry images have nothing to do with metrics, business acumen, or sales experience. If this helped push them towards making their website easier to use in any way, then I'm happy. I feel awful for any designer who has to deal with Dilbertian management and bureaucracy, and I agree with the previous commenter - our frustration should have been primarily directed at the management team at either company. That still doesn't change the fact that there are designers responsible for crafting the pixels, and the pixels show a general lack of care. This might be due to the culture of the company, poor direction, or a myriad of other factors, but it doesn't make the work itself any less sloppy. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a brash 23-year-old, but I'd rather say something and risk looking like an asshole than continue to patronize a company that doesn't care about their customer experience. -Andrew

210 points by antidaily 17y ago

Serious irony...

I'm glad someone wrote this. Dustin Curtis is an ass. An insightful ass, but an ass all the same. Maybe there's no such thing as bad publicity; but while I'll keep reading his blog, I'd hate to work with him. I like his website, but his hubris is monstrous. Anyone can crank out a clean design in a few hours when they're working with no specs, business goals, market research, investors or actual customers to answer to. (I liked his AA.com design, but it was one page deep and dumped critical parts of the original's site map.) As for the guy getting canned and the faux 'net outrage, gimme a break. He should've known better. Fortune 500 companies that employ tens of thousands of people aren't known for deviating from policies as basic as you keep your mouth shut about the inner workings of the company in a published public forum.

jmtame 17y ago
i have heard bad things about dustin curtis from friends of mine.. i find it ironic that he's criticizing the moral scruples of others when he has several of his own.
- jmtulloss 17y ago
  And now you're doing so publicly without actually bringing up any facts? Poor form.
  - jmtame 17y ago
    it's personal, i'm not going into detail. he ripped someone off, and if he wanted to fix it he could. but he chooses not to, and criticizes others for their behaviors. i just find that to be pretty hypocritical.
    - dcurtis 17y ago
      Hey, please email me: hi@dustincurtis.com .
      - diN0bot 17y ago
        jmtame's email is in his profile. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmtame http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmtame (no need to keep making public statements...)
        daleharvey 17y ago
        I think its perfectly acceptable to make a public statement when you have been publicly accused of ripping people off
        zackattack 17y ago
        I think people should upvote jmtame. He probably wouldn't have gotten any response from Dustin Curtis unless he leveraged the threat of public embarrassment. Similarly, whenever I see a bemmu thread, I point out that he owes me $20, because the only way to bring him out of the woodwork is through social shaming.
      - jmtame 17y ago
        to follow up with all of this: this whole thing got sorted out shortly after bringing it up. seems like it was a misunderstanding on both sides. cheers!
    - jmtulloss 17y ago
      I'm not saying you don't have a reason to be angry at the guy, I'm just saying that an opaque comment questioning somebody's character in a public forum is not appropriate.
      - jmtame 17y ago
        the reason i brought it up here was because he has ignored e-mails in the past. why would he respond to one of my e-mails if he ignored someone else's? he is responding to mine now, and if he makes things right (which he says he is trying to do now), it will have turned out to be a big misunderstanding and i will gladly take back my negative opinion towards him.
jeremymims 17y ago
Wade, After reading this original blog post you wrote, I think it's a bit of a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The only difference is Ford intervened to stop a PR disaster and AA fanned the flames. I know you're well intentioned, but there's no need to resort to name calling. http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/12/pr-disaster-ford-suing-people-who-about-ford-cars/ http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/12/pr-disaster-ford-sui...
- davidw 17y ago
  Yes, let's please keep in mind the idea that you'd be comfortable saying what you're writing in your comments directly to someone's face.
  - wmeredith 17y ago
    I am. I was actually assuming that Dustin would read that when I wrote it. (He's posted here before in response to linked articles.) It's OK if he knows I think his writing style makes him look like an ass. I suspect he won't care or more likely already knows it, he's not dumb. Most people that have been publishing anything online that's even remotely well read gets a thick skin or gives up fast.
- wmeredith 17y ago
  I claimed no superiority over Dustin Curtis in action or demeanor. And I'll stand behind that article I wrote about Ford. It's ludicrous for a company to sue their own fan base. And the second it was found out that was not the case, I started working with both Ford and Scott Monty to get their side of the story out within minutes. (Read the linked article for context.)
mustpax 17y ago
In that case, I don't understand why we are celebrating the soul-crushing mediocrity of these Fortune 500 companies. If anything Mr. X's letter made AA look pretty good, and I fail to see what super-secret strategic plans he was airing either. Companies are run by people, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to make rational decisions that treat their employees with dignity. Dustin might be brash, but he is pointing out obvious problems. It makes no sense to bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer.
- itistoday 17y ago
  > In that case, I don't understand why we are celebrating the soul-crushing mediocrity of these Fortune 500 companies. I think that bears repeating.
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    It bears repeating several times. This is more about a clash of cultures than anything else.
- antonovka 17y ago
  Dustin might be brash, but he is pointing out obvious problems. It makes no sense to bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer. If you're trying to get something useful done, the point isn't to be right, but rather, to convince others of your position. If you're trying to draw attention to yourself at the cost of others, ranting publicly is a fine strategy. To quote the original article: Fire your entire design team, if you have one. Hire an outside design firm ... as quickly as possible. Your in-house team is obviously incapable of building a good experience. It's this brazen self-promotion and a lack of maturity and decorum that causes individuals to "bash him for being 21 and not having yet been turned into a so serious, cynical corporate designer".
  - sineltor 17y ago
    the point isn't to be right, but rather, to convince others of your position. Correct. However, he’s not really trying to convince AA to change their strategy. He’s trying to convince us that AA’s strategy is dumb. Because user interface design is important, and its not ok to foul it up. If the best way to do that is by brashly pointing out AA’s mistakes, so be it. I tip my hat to Dustin for fighting the good fight.
rantfoil 17y ago
Hubris? Hubris is a loaded term that is purely subjective. He's one of the most talented designers I know, and he deserves to speak strongly. Humility doesn't need to enter here. A humble designer is one who affects no change indeed. Designers should be less humble. When engineers or business guys or management or anyone makes a product lousier, they should get up and shout, and raise hell. Apple wins because the guy who cares the most about user experience happens to run the show. And last I checked, humble wasn’t really a word you could use to describe him.
- deleted 17y ago
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- tbrooks 17y ago
  You are equating humility to being an ass-kisser. You can be humble and raise some hell; people will respect you for it. If you're a dick about things, people will soon learn to ignore you. You can dissent and be humble - the two are not mutually exclusive.
  - rantfoil 17y ago
    In the glory days of Microsoft (circa Windows 95), the company culture was very different than in the Ballmer Administration. There used to be a class called 'Precision Questioning' that was specifically about being very efficient at asking very pointed, very direct questions. To the uninitiated, it came across as incredibly rude and disrespectful. But it was effective. Things got done fast, and BS was caught immediately, because the questions that got asked were rude, disrespectful, but vitally needed to make the right decisions. It cut through to the truth as quickly as possible. I think there's something happening here -- being direct and truthful hurts, but to create great things, you have to set aside feelings. Since Ballmer took over the reigns, Microsoft no longer teaches this course to its managers. Kinder and gentler, he said -- but there's a very real cost to kinder and gentler.
    - tbrooks 17y ago
      Microsoft's success (and failure in many areas) extends beyond communication styles. In part, Microsoft developed a "we know best" culture that fails to see both opportunities and hazards. Being so inwardly focused creates a low sense of urgency. Obviously AA and other large corps face the same problem. Still, it is possible have direct/pointed discussions and maintain humility. Take Zappos for example. Two of Zappos core values are 9.Be Passionate and Determined and 10.Be Humble. The two are not in conflict with each other. They've done well, as has Chick-fil-A - another large company that esteems humility.
kyro 17y ago
Right, and yet, even with tens of comments here, triggered by Dustin's posts, about how utterly crappy AA's experience is, we shouldn't criticize AA because that's just how big companies are. JetBlue is concerned with all the same factors you listed, and they're great. His posts resulted in a lot people vocalizing their poor experiences with AA. That's what's important, regardless of how he expressed it. I'd say that the harsh way he delivered his message really helped people in expressing their opinions. HN seems a lot softer than I expected.
- unalone 17y ago
  Softer? Ha, you're mischaracterizing this reaction. We got to be assholes towards American Airlines three times in a row, and now we get to insult the other side. Expect more insulting of AA in the future, too. Though that's tongue-in-cheek, there's a serious cause behind it, which is that we have a community big enough and smart enough to argue both sides. Depending on the source of the article we're commenting on, one side is always louder than others. So on Steve Jobs Is Best CEO, we get more pro-Apple, and on Apple Censored Me, we get more anti-Apple. Smart people on both sides, but each one focusing on a different story. So there're people here who hate AA's site and there're people who think Dustin is pretending a wisdom he doesn't have, and both those people get a place to place their beliefs. I think that's healthy for the community. It lets lurkers see both sides of the discussion. I fear when we become like r/politics on Reddit, where only one side dominates.
  - kyro 17y ago
    Yeah, I get that. People here are just taking cheap shots based on their belief that because Dustin hasn't worked at a big company, his opinion and demand for a better product are invalid. I wonder if people would have said the same had it been a 50yr. old expressing his frustrations just as aggressively. The argument that you need to know about big company to understand why their products are the way they are is a stupid one. I'm sure the majority of AA customers are a lot less knowledgeable than Dustin about these types of things. I guess that makes them more ignorant, which, by people's argument here, should mean they are in a lesser place to express their disappointment. But in reality, they're a customer. Their opinion matters just as much. Also, for the highest voted comment here to open up with "Dustin is an ass" shows that this is far from civilized and intelligent conversation. He's not being judged on the merits of his work, but rather on a personal level. That's low. You idiot. :P

txxxxd 17y ago

This author undervalues criticism. Being polite is not always the most effective way to create change.

diN0bot 17y ago
it depends on what kind of change you want and at what cost. great changers focus so purely on the matter at hand that they do not let their causes get dragged down by insults or violence. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr come to mind. ps - "I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it." a little humility goes a long way. defensiveness and pigheadedness are quite different from intention and stance. passion is different than fighting everyone. making friends and spreading passion might even be more effective.

dcurtis 17y ago

I agree with a lot of the points in this article. Yes, my original letter to AA was, admittedly, a bit vitriolic. But I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it. I'm a designer and an entrepreneur. I'm passionate about great user experiences. I think fighting for great user experiences from companies is a good thing. What is passion if you don't fight for what you love? We're on the cusp of a changing society. Customer experience is becoming, in a very literal way, the brand of a company. And when I come across companies so clueless that they won't spend 50k to hire a design firm to design their online identity/experience, I can't help but wonder what kind of negative effect that has on the evolution of the internet and on customer experience design as an industry. Fixing AA.com would be [strike]ridiculously[/strike] relatively cheap and simple, especially if it was just a new skin based on the logic they already have built (even though there are serious flaws there as well). Yet the company has not done this. It hasn't even hinted at this, and it fired the one guy who seemed to care about it in the organization. This is a management problem, not a design problem. When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid. But I honestly believe the fault for a failing like this, a failing so visceral that it affects the image of the entire company in the eyes of its customers, rests solely in lap of the CEO. American Airlines is no doubt a terrible company, and not just from a design perspective. The culture there is broken, the "business" is failing (it loses billions of dollars a year), and the majority of customers hate the experience. Something is wrong. Bringing attention to it, I think, can't possibly be a bad thing.

dannyr 17y ago
Dustin, It is always easy to say that things are easy to fix on an outsider's perspective. In reality, it isn't. I have worked for a big company before and changing things, even the obvious ones, are often difficult. You may not like the user experience of the site but it is possible that conversion is still high. There is definitely management problem based on their finances. Redesigning their site may not be in their top priority now.
- deleted 17y ago
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- 17y ago

lionhearted 17y ago

This seems like a little cognitive dissonance to me: > So where does that leave us? A 21-year-old wrote a blog post. A guy broke the corporate rules and got fired. The internet (and the blogger!) is outraged. > But the web will still be full of arrogant, uninformed, polarizing, self-promoting, controversy-creating content that has ramifications no one wants to own up to. And consequently, the web will still be lacking in common courtesy, humility, and the admittance that most of us don’t know best. Which is sad, mostly because it’s true. What irony! The So Serious guy is calling out others on being not courteous and not humble in a discourteous, unhumble guy.

pyre 17y ago
Not even that, he's fueling the controversy that he's criticizing by writing this article.
tbrooks 17y ago
Really? How is Joshua's position arrogant and discourteous? He never attacks Dustin as a person. He calls Dustin's methods and actions into question. I fail to see the irony in this...
- ellyagg 17y ago
  For one, he repeatedly makes a point of dcurtis' age. That's not really appropriate.
  - unalone 17y ago
    It is if part of his point's that the Internet's letting itself get worked up over what a not-completely-mature kid said. The fact that Hacker News and other sites have had this raging debate over Dustin's writing belies the fact that basically he's a college student mouthing off a big company, and that we're assuming against the odds that he knows more than an industry professional does. At that point it's absolutely appropriate to remind us of who Dustin is.

nzmsv 17y ago

OK, I get the point about being nice, but the AA.com design is ugly. I'm sure as a giant company AA is used to criticism. There are many big companies with sites not only ugly, but unusable. For example, Rogers.com (Canada's cell phone almost-monopoly). Half the site (the account management interface) seems not to work with anything except IE6. Are the people responsible for that abomination incompetent? I'd say so. But we are all supposed to be nice to the slow big companies and not talk about it on the Internet :)

cj 17y ago

Controversy? I'd call it holding people accountable for their actions. AA has a terrible website and their employees know it. Mr. X shared "corporate secrets" and got fired for it. AA fired an (seemingly excellent) employee for no substantial reason. Dustin got called out for shoving a design in a companies's face. Holding people accountable is respectable. And for that, I respect. I respect you and Dustin. Accountability is a rare bird these days indeed.

ratsbane 17y ago

I'm sure the "Creating Controversy..." writer has some reasonable points. Perhaps Dustin Curtis really is only fourteen years old and is a frightful bounder who drops his aitches and has cocoa and bloaters for supper.* But really, Dustin Curtis makes some good points. The reason sites like AA's are so much worse than they could be is precisely because of bloated and poorly-organized infrastructure and competing interests. That excuse isn't going to stop customers from going to better, more easily-navigable sites if they have a choice. I have bought plane tickets more than once from airline B instead of airline A just because I couldn't get what I needed on airline A's site. About a year ago USAirways.com charged me eight times for the same flight and never sent an e-ticket. I don't buy from them any more. If I can't find and buy the best flight from airline A because their web site doesn't work well it's the same result to me as if they don't have that flight. Look at how much more market value has been created by companies like Kayak.com who have used a lot less resources to create a much more effective buying experience than the most of the big lumbering airlines. Their gain has come about because the airlines have not been able to overcome their organizational problems. Also, what Mister X* wrote was quite tactful. While it acknowledged some internal problems at AA (which certainly are obvious anyway) it did so in a very graceful way and provide a pretty good counter-argument. It was about the best statement American Airlines could have hoped anyone would have put out in response to Dustin Curtis' piece. You might argue that they were justified in firing him. You might be right (and you might not) but they were also very clearly very stupid to fire him. Had they merely given him a mild rebuke and then promoted him then they could have maintained control over what has turned into a small scandal for AA. Instead, he's no longer bound to watch his words so carefully. I hope he'll have more to say. So if Dustin Curtis really does chew broken bottles and turn into a werewolf at the time of the full moon* that's too bad. All I know about him is that he seems like a pretty decent designer who has strong opinions and isn't afraid to voice them but who probably hasn't read Frederick Brooks. Maybe if someone upstairs at AA had an attitude like Dustin Curtis and Mister X I wouldn't be putting them on my list of "companies to avoid doing business with whenever there's a reasonable alternative." * P.G Wodehouse "Service With a Smile" * Why does this name make me think of "For British Eyes Only..." * Another P.G. Wodehouse reference I can't place.

madair 17y ago

Corporations are so very dehumanizing. The good of the few shareholders at the expense of the human experience for the individuals who labor typically a minimum of 1/2 of their waking hours but are summarily fired if they so much as speak their mind. We've accepted this system. Many people at this site will vote me down for questioning the good of the corporate body over the good of the individual. Many will simply vote me down just because it was in the poor guy's contract. But the bottom line is that American Airlines fires people who try to reasonably speak their mind. Simple as that. And the people who vote down against the good of people in favor of the good of the corporate body are the enemy.

philwelch 17y ago
For the record, I almost voted you down because when I read things like "many people at this site will vote me down", I take it as a dare. Your point is no weaker if you leave out the baiting and reverse psychology.
- madair 17y ago
  It's not reverse psychology. It's my disappointment at this public forum when it collectively decides something is too far out of the norm of opinion.
  - Pahalial 17y ago
    You could easily have phrased that to avoid coming across as reverse psychology - "Since when is HN so defensive of <bigco policy> and shareholder interests at the detriment of users" etc - as a few other posts in this thread have done. Note how most of them are not tremendously downvoted. You, on the other hand, mention voting down your post three times in a single paragraph, each time attacking potential reasons - not covering every reason of course, only the ones that everyone sane should agree are Bad Things. Philosophy class is a bit far now, but isn't this a classic red herring? "And the people who vote down against the good of people in favor of the good of the corporate body are the enemy." Clearly meant to make people think that if they vote you down they are the enemy of the Good of the People, rather than letting them form their own responses based on the merits of your argument. Bullshit rhethoric likes this is what has no place here. Discuss the facts or the ethics of matters as you will, but please leave karma-baiting rhethoric out of your posts.

marcusbooster 17y ago

I'm tired of this meme of unsolicited and superficial redesigns of Company X's front page. I understand this economy is tough for designers and there's not a lot of portfolio jobs around, but I think it's more impressive to design for a little nonsense webapp that actually does something. At the very least if would demonstrate you can take something from Photoshop into the real world.

djb_hackernews 17y ago
I've spammed my twitter app enough to get feedback, but one thing I was hoping to get when I posted it to HN was some design critiques. If someone wants to put a design together for it check my past submissions for the link and email me.

kyro 17y ago

This article is outright stupid. Let's say for a second that Dustin really is a ridiculously ignorant designer (he's not) - who gives a crap? He's a customer who is really displeased not only with the AA website but with the total experience. And the majority of the comments on the other submissions were about how even people here hated the company, before you found out about the firing of Mr. X. Ignorant, fine. Harsh, fine. You guys are getting caught up in criticizing Dustin because it's the easiest thing to do. It's weird how all you anti bigco people are so riled up in the way someone expressed their poor customer experience and overlooking the fact that AA fired an employee trying to reach out. I know it violated the contract, whatever, but that just shows us where AA's mind is. Mr. X didn't say anything that made me look down upon AA. We know big companies run slowly, that's a constant. I doubt there's one person out there who read Mr. X's statement and learned something uniquely bad about AA that they didn't know of before. If anything, it made them look more humane. You're right though, a 21 year old's ignorance is the real issue here. Forget widespread displeasure with AA, or the fact that they fired an employee for personally reaching out to a customer that else wouldn't have been reached out to, it's the arrogance that really kills you.

unalone 17y ago
Oy, Kyro. Usually I side with what you've got to say but this time I think you're in the wrong. > Let's say for a second that Dustin really is a ridiculously ignorant designer (he's not) He is in that he's never worked for a major company in a design position. > He's a customer who is really displeased not only with the AA website but with the total experience. I've had to deal with customers before. I've had customers tell me to fire everybody in a movie theatre for incompetence. Usually we pretend like we care in front of them, then roll our eyes once they're gone. > And the majority of the comments on the other submissions were about how even people here hated the company, before you found out about the firing of Mr. X. There was just as much criticism before. The summary of mass opinion is: We hate American Airlines and their design, but the issue has been oversimplified here. > I know it violated the contract, whatever, but that just shows us where AA's mind is. Mr. X didn't say anything that made me look down upon AA. The deal is when you sign an agreement, you follow it. What if Mr. X had been an Apple employee leaking a new product? That's what he did here. Perhaps not as severely, but it's the same corporate crime. And his response let Dustin write a second article bashing people at American Airlines, so it invited even more bad PR. > If anything, it made them look more humane. Mr. X was paid to design web sites. AA has other people who're meant to make them look humane. Right now they're sucking, but it's sound in theory because it lets everybody know what they're supposed to do. It works well for other companies. AA is bad, but they won't fix the problem by growing laxer.

muhfuhkuh 17y ago

All this for what basically amounts to the flickr homepage flipped horizontally and an extra text box added? Dustin Curtis doesn't seem very creative to me.

scotty79 17y ago
Mr. X got fired because Dustin published his email. What reasonable man could publish somebody's email in which author bitches about his corporate workplace and expect not to get him fired by this? Corporations perceive them selves as saint. If anyone complains about the smell in their cathedral he gets kicked out. You can probably get away with such offense if you are customer but never if you are employee. Another question is: Is money worth so much to justify visiting such smelly place daily?

angusdavis 17y ago

I have two stories to add to this discussion, although perhaps this discussion does not need more fuel to the fire. First, when I was 21 (in 1999), I was the founder of my last startup, Tellme. So I have been a young entrepreneur. Second, one of Tellme's customers (in 2002) was American Airlines. So I understand how they work and the challenges they face. At Tellme, we built a lost baggage voice application for AA. They figured if we could make their 800 number keep customers happy when the airline lost your bag, we'd be able to do a decent job on the rest of their apps. I'm proud to say that today Tellme answers every call to American Airlines, but back to lost bags. In the course of building that initial application, I learned things like: airlines issue a ticket number, a PNR, a bag tracking number and a lost bag ID to customers. These numbers are all different and customers don't know which is which. I also learned that at that time, American could not pull up a list of reservations (PNRs) based on your Frequent Flyer number, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary that year. Finally, I learned that passenger names for the lost bags database contained only the first 8 characters of a passenger's last name. Projects were underway with major subcontractors such as Sabre and EDS at that time to resolve and improve some of these issues. But the point is, big companies have complex systems. Some of these things were unbelievably bad at first glance to a tech guy like me, but they were all there for a reason. We also take for granted the fact they manage the incredible operational logistics of taking off a few thousand airplanes and moving millions of people around at 500+ mph in the air every year -- not too shabby! So my takeaway #1 is that it is far too easy for geeks, especially inexperienced geeks, to bash the complexities of big enterprises. At Tellme, we were successful by working within the constraints we had. For the lost bags app, we figured a consumer would never know which bag ID or ticket number we were asking for, so we built an app that found the user's lost bag record by asking the caller for 1) city where bag was reported lost; 2) date of loss and 3) last name of the passenger. Since the last names in the lost bags database contained only the first 8 characters of a user's last name, we used the US Census database of all names to automatically expand all 8-character last names into all the possible last names (e.g. Williams would be expanded to also include Williamson, etc., as a possible match). Throughout our deployment and work with AA, I became really impressed with the talent and dedication of their employees. A woman I worked with closely wore a necklace with a charm she had been awarded for 15 years of loyal service to the company. In 2002 the company was 4 months post-9/11 and to see the people there move full speed ahead on new applications amidst the greatest challenge to their existence in the history of their industry -- not to mention a national tragedy -- was inspiring. Second, I was a 21-year old entrepreneur once. I was brash, insensitive, and abrasive. I grew up an only child. You do the math. At times I made cynical remarks that were not helpful. I was smart, and I seldom doubted my own opinions. As my mother would say, "Often wrong, but seldom in doubt." One of the folks on our founding team suggested I read Dale Carnegie. Another gave me the Steven Covey book. In the end I became a more effective communicator not just from reading books but by growing a little older. Yes, Dustin's remarks about AA where he paints them as some sort of completely incompetent idiots are wholly inappropriate and abrasive and unfair. I think that's in large part because the guy is 21. I also understand that designers can be an especially opinionated bunch. Of course, this type of vitriol is not limited to youth. For example, folks on one end of the political spectrum or the other often refer to Nancy Pilosi or George Bush with disdain that ignores the humanity of these individuals. Whether due to youth or passion, people lose their perspective, and when we do this, our message gets lost in the heat of its delivery. My recommendations would be to try to put yourself in the shoes of the guy you're criticizing. You can be frank in your criticism, but you don't need to be callous. It gets easier with age. I'm still to this day critical of some things, and often I am passionate about those opinions, but it's possible to be a passionate critic without coming off as a jerk. It's something I work at all the time. It's also possible to be an airline and have a good web site. As an American Airlines customer, I hope they improve a lot in that area soon, as Virgin America is definitely setting the bar today for in-air customer experience, and neither has a particularly great Web site. Yet.

scotty79 17y ago

It's actually quite funny that they fired him for violation of NDA. It's like an old joke that someone got punished for disclosing military secrets after he said that general is stupid.

apsec112 17y ago

"It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function." Wait... what? None of this makes much sense at all. "Metrics"? Metrics for what? A metric is just a way of measuring things. What are we measuring? Pixels? Number of visitors? Number of bytes transferred? "Creative direction"? Again, what does that mean, exactly? It's an airline website. It's supposed to be elegant and functional, not a work of postmodernist art. "Business acumen"? Business = getting people to pay you, and people will be more inclined to pay you, all other things being equal, if your website is better designed. Is there some reason why a website redesign would cause AA to lose money? The cost of designing a website is trivial, in comparison to AA's annual budget of $22,935,000,000. "Sales experience"? "Sales" usually means selling things to people in person, or over the phone, which is a very different business from designing a website to sell people things (ask anyone who's done both). "Actual functionality" is the only legitimate criticism here. It's quite a bit harder to make a website that actually works than to draw it. "Enterprise scale" is a myth. Justin.TV, according to their website, currently has 29 employees (including the founders). Justin.TV's Alexa rank is #222. American Airlines has 85,500 employees, and their website is less popular (rank #1,465), and almost certainly requires less bandwidth and storage space to boot. I won't comment on whether the guy is or isn't a jerk, but the ability to spit out a long list of fancy words ("metrics"? Come on) does not a legitimate criticism make.

metalab 17y ago

My Comment to Joshua: I appreciate what you're saying here, but I think you're mischaracterizing the point of both of our articles. Neither of us proposed our mockups as comprehensive redesigns or attempted to address anything past the basic visuals. I wanted to buy shoes, and I found it to be a really frustrating experience, so I said something. If the door to a retail store is hard to open and you complain about it, does it make you an arrogant prick for failing to think through all the potential reasons for the problem? Maybe the company handyman only comes every two weeks. Maybe there's a mountain of paperwork required before any repairs can be made. Maybe the staff needs approval from management. Does that make your frustration with the door situation any less relevant? It definitely makes you empathize with the staff, and speaks volumes about the company's ineffective management, but that doesn't change the fact that the door is really hard to open, and this is a problem for you as well as other customers. Understanding the context is important, but it doesn't make our critiques any less relevant. You argue that, "it’s easy to 'design' when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality". Of course, but think about all the companies that manage to get it right. Huge, lumbering corporations like Amazon, JetBlue, and Virgin all manage to pull off great user experience despite facing the same challenges. Why shouldn't Zappos and American Airlines be held to the same standard? I found the Zappos website insanely frustrating to use, so I spent an evening identifying some of the problems I spotted and added a mockup to clarify. Yes, I was a little inflammatory, but the overarching message was a positive one. I wasn't trying to tell them how to sell shoes or reinvent their business - my article was intended to show how a few simple changes overtop of the existing website could help make it easier to use. Blurry images have nothing to do with metrics, business acumen, or sales experience. If this helped push them towards making their website easier to use in any way, then I'm happy. I feel awful for any designer who has to deal with Dilbertian management and bureaucracy, and I agree with the previous commenter - our frustration should have been primarily directed at the management team at either company. That still doesn't change the fact that there are designers responsible for crafting the pixels, and the pixels show a general lack of care. This might be due to the culture of the company, poor direction, or a myriad of other factors, but it doesn't make the work itself any less sloppy. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a brash 23-year-old, but I'd rather say something and risk looking like an asshole than continue to patronize a company that doesn't care about their customer experience. -Andrew