6 ms·

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 regre

by 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
  [deleted]
- pyre 17y ago
  > 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. Let's call a spade a spade here though. In a lot of these large companies the barriers are artificial. Especially when your redesign will 'encroach' on someone's little fiefdom that they've cultivated over the years. I've heard stories of people that were left to their own devices (even in a small company) and when it became a dictate that he/she had to open up to others in the company they quit rather than give up their little 'kingdom.' These barriers are not there to protect the company in any way, shape, or form. They are there due to petty politicking and stuff that should best be left on the 3rd grade schoolyard. Sure we have to deal with them if we are going to exist in 'corporate culture' but they don't need to be there. This happens in large companies because at some point it becomes harder to control/eliminate, not because it's a necessary part of being a large company.
  - mattm 17y ago
    Maybe they are artificial but they are still there. It doesn't really change anything. Like the parent poster, I too have worked in a large company. I was hired mainly to re-develop the intranet (it looked like it was designed in 1995). When I resigned 9 months later I still hadn't done any work on it. Now I had access to the files. I could have just changed it myself but there would have been an uproar and I probably would have been fired. In fact, just making minor changes such as cleaning up the CSS got me in trouble because other people used Dreamweaver to edit some pages and my changes made things look different in Dreamweaver. I imagine the people responsible for the AA website are in a similar boat. They have access to change things but there are these barriers - artificial or not. Now I've worked at some different sized companies and I've realised that is the way things were supposed to be at that company. This company handled people's pensions and needed to be conservative. The systems in place were DESIGNED to slow things down to make sure that everything was done right. Startups have their own speed of work and large companies have a much slower pace. There are reasons for both.
iamwil 17y ago
Whenever you've re-skinned, I've suffered. It's never as easy as it seems.
- jeremymcanally 17y ago
  As I always say, beauty is skin deep; user experience isn't. It takes a little more than some new shine on something to really improve a user's overall experience. It often takes a near complete restructure of the information and logic flow.
Mz 17y ago
"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" Stray thought, which likely won't matter to you: Mr. X, who used your site and got fired for it, didn't exactly have a great user experience.
- pyre 17y ago
  That's a lot like saying if I purposefully drive off a cliff in my Ford Mustang that Ford gave me a poor user experience because I ended up dead.
  - Mz 17y ago
    Ford likely doesn't have the option of removing you from the driver's seat before you go over the cliff. Webmaster's do have the power to remove content that could do harm to the user's actual life. Most of them don't give a flip and wouldn't waste any of their effort to protect someone who posted something they might regret 10 minutes later but be unable to remove once it's posted. Most of them seem to agree with you: It's your problem, bozo. I have personally left sites where the owner has such an attitude. One of them is now upping the efforts to strong-arm users into joining and participating. They seem to still not get the concept that honey is better than vinegar.
    - pyre 17y ago
      No offense, but dcurtis (at least claims) to have asked Mr X if it was ok to publish the email. Mr X agreed to allow it as long as his name was removed. How is this now dcurtis's fault when Mr X consciously chose to allow the email to be published? This is something that seems (at least on face value) to be perfectly reasonable. He published something from an 'anonymous source.' When was the last time you heard of a company searching the text of an email through their email system to find the culprit? I could see this being a boneheaded way to protect an 'anonymous source' for an Apple rumor (seeing how cut-throat Apple is with plugging leaks), but when it comes to some random large corporation... probably not. It's not even like any of the information that he provided could be construed by an outside person as a 'trade secret' either. On top of that, it's impossible for dcurtis to know what type of contracts Mr X has signed with AA or what their wording is (or even what the current enforcement policies are).
lionhearted 17y ago
> But I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it. Okay. I respect this tremendously, but... > When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid. ...then you've got to be ready for this. You're going to get it your whole life if you keep acting the way you're acting. It upsets people. They think you're acting out of your place, and you haven't put in your hours and earned your stripes and who the hell does this kid think he is? I went through a similar thing when I was younger and went into business. Here's one of my favorite quotes, it's by Bertrand Russel: "Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves." Okay, so step 1 - you've got to be willing to accept that you're going to provoke reactions like this if you keep acting as you've been acting, questioning authority and the way things are in a very confrontational way. And when people confront you, they won't fight fair and fight your arguments, they'll pull anything out of the hat they can to discredit you or get under your skin. It's going to happen more often rather than less as you go forwards. So if you can accept it, and keep on going, you can do some things. So I support you as someone who dropped out of high school and went into business quite young, and got called all sorts of nasty things too, and I admire you character. With that said: > Fixing AA.com would be ridiculously cheap and simple... This is where you go wrong. No, it probably wouldn't. You can get all the mileage you're currently getting, and a lot more credibility by changing that statement to, "Hell, maybe there'd be a lot of bureaucracy to cut through to fix AA.com and it'd cost some coin, but it's possible and it needs to be done." --> Lots more credibility. Doesn't lose much bite. When in doubt, fake the modesty. You'll get much more mileage out of life. Later you might learn that some things are more complicated than they initially appear, but you're going to get better mileage anyway if you sympathize with the difficulties people are likely to face trying to make change. And if you're a little extra nice and sympathetic, and it really would be cheap and easy, then your suggestions sound even more palatable. So - I'm with you, and keep on trucking man. Maybe add a touch of sympathizing with difficulties people face (guess/fake it if you can't see any potential difficulties) and your critique is much more likely to be received well.
- dannyr 17y ago
  I agree with lionhearted about earning your stripes. What have you done in the past that should make AA.com take your redesign seriously? There are a number of web entrepreneurs/hackers that I pay attention to. Some are young, some are old but I know they have paid their dues and earned their stripes.
SirWart 17y ago
I don't think anyone would disagree with you that AA has an awful site, but they seem to be reacting to how you phrased your criticism. If criticism is phrased in the wrong way, people will instinctively go into face-saving mode, and ignore the actual feedback ("Can you believe how arrogant this 21 year old is!"). I know this because I've had self-righteous outbursts due to my passion, but I've learned the hard way that it can sometimes rub people the wrong way and actually hurt your cause. (PS. I think 37signals did this sort of thing brilliantly: http://37signals.com/better http://37signals.com/better. Reading the copy just makes me feel warm inside and shows good emotional intelligence.)
potatolicious 17y ago
Fighting for great user experiences is one thing - what you did was not that. You called out the entirety of AA's online design department, called them names, and then proceeded to be smug and use the opportunity to be self-aggrandizing. If you really just wanted to fight what you thought was a terrible user experience, you would've brought up a list of usability concerns and optionally some remedies. You would not have called them names, you would not have called for mass firings, nor would you have gone into insane hyperbole. In this new age of online communication we as a society really need to find ways of remaining civil without seeing each others' faces. Working for one of the largest sites on the internet, I know first hand how difficult to get even a single usability feature pushed through - for good reason. A wholesale redesign would take a supreme amount of coordination, dedication, and effort, from multiple teams of people. It is anything but "cheap and simple", and your continuous insistence of this falsehood shows how little real experience you have in large-scale web dev. Failing to appreciate the complexities of an enterprise-scale website makes you inexperienced and perhaps ignorant. Failing to admit that there are complexities to an enterprise-scale website that you aren't aware of is being smug and arrogant.
pxlpshr 17y ago
So, I think you're a really talented designer, I don't entirely disagree with you, and I understand your frustration. However... Brand development is complex and takes years to develop. All this brand-strategy-through-design is fucking nonsense, stop drinking your own kool-aid. That's why I got out of the advertising industry and into consumer products. I'm sorry but designers are not that critical to a brand, and proclaiming such sounds extremely ego centric and naive. Furthermore, you're criticizing one of many sales channels and generalizing the entire company based on that. You can buy AA tickets through a variety of websites, retailers, travel agents, etc. -- not solely AA.com. In fact, I don't think I've ever bought an AA ticket on AA.com. When I read your response to Mr. X's response a few months ago, I was quite surprised that YOU were surprised about all the moving pieces in a big corporation. I think you lack quite a bit of business experience, and snail mailers aren't going to get you there. I caution you to think about your word choice when you say things like clueless and incompetence because you're branding yourself a millennial.
- rantfoil 17y ago
  I hardly think saying "This is the way we always do it" is a good enough reason to stop criticizing American Airlines. Designers may not have been critical to brands in the past (just buy authenticity through well-intentioned PR and ad placements)... But that will not be true in the future, and bringing attention to bad experiences is THE WAY designers can bring about a better world.
  - pxlpshr 17y ago
    I wasn't implying that one should settle, but companies have life cycles too. The original people/passion that ignited the company moves on, retires, or dies. It happens all the time in every sector, it's good for capitalism to have this kind of churn. Fighting change in some big businesses is like trying to teach an old dog new tricks.
    - rantfoil 17y ago
      You're right that these things happen in cycles -- just like that "The Office is like the office" quote -- things get big and degenerate. But something about accepting it as unchangeable fact does not sit well with me.

by dcurtis 17y ago

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
[deleted]
pyre 17y ago
> 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. Let's call a spade a spade here though. In a lot of these large companies the barriers are artificial. Especially when your redesign will 'encroach' on someone's little fiefdom that they've cultivated over the years. I've heard stories of people that were left to their own devices (even in a small company) and when it became a dictate that he/she had to open up to others in the company they quit rather than give up their little 'kingdom.' These barriers are not there to protect the company in any way, shape, or form. They are there due to petty politicking and stuff that should best be left on the 3rd grade schoolyard. Sure we have to deal with them if we are going to exist in 'corporate culture' but they don't need to be there. This happens in large companies because at some point it becomes harder to control/eliminate, not because it's a necessary part of being a large company.
- mattm 17y ago
  Maybe they are artificial but they are still there. It doesn't really change anything. Like the parent poster, I too have worked in a large company. I was hired mainly to re-develop the intranet (it looked like it was designed in 1995). When I resigned 9 months later I still hadn't done any work on it. Now I had access to the files. I could have just changed it myself but there would have been an uproar and I probably would have been fired. In fact, just making minor changes such as cleaning up the CSS got me in trouble because other people used Dreamweaver to edit some pages and my changes made things look different in Dreamweaver. I imagine the people responsible for the AA website are in a similar boat. They have access to change things but there are these barriers - artificial or not. Now I've worked at some different sized companies and I've realised that is the way things were supposed to be at that company. This company handled people's pensions and needed to be conservative. The systems in place were DESIGNED to slow things down to make sure that everything was done right. Startups have their own speed of work and large companies have a much slower pace. There are reasons for both.

iamwil 17y ago

Whenever you've re-skinned, I've suffered. It's never as easy as it seems.

jeremymcanally 17y ago
As I always say, beauty is skin deep; user experience isn't. It takes a little more than some new shine on something to really improve a user's overall experience. It often takes a near complete restructure of the information and logic flow.

Mz 17y ago

"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" Stray thought, which likely won't matter to you: Mr. X, who used your site and got fired for it, didn't exactly have a great user experience.

pyre 17y ago
That's a lot like saying if I purposefully drive off a cliff in my Ford Mustang that Ford gave me a poor user experience because I ended up dead.
- Mz 17y ago
  Ford likely doesn't have the option of removing you from the driver's seat before you go over the cliff. Webmaster's do have the power to remove content that could do harm to the user's actual life. Most of them don't give a flip and wouldn't waste any of their effort to protect someone who posted something they might regret 10 minutes later but be unable to remove once it's posted. Most of them seem to agree with you: It's your problem, bozo. I have personally left sites where the owner has such an attitude. One of them is now upping the efforts to strong-arm users into joining and participating. They seem to still not get the concept that honey is better than vinegar.
  - pyre 17y ago
    No offense, but dcurtis (at least claims) to have asked Mr X if it was ok to publish the email. Mr X agreed to allow it as long as his name was removed. How is this now dcurtis's fault when Mr X consciously chose to allow the email to be published? This is something that seems (at least on face value) to be perfectly reasonable. He published something from an 'anonymous source.' When was the last time you heard of a company searching the text of an email through their email system to find the culprit? I could see this being a boneheaded way to protect an 'anonymous source' for an Apple rumor (seeing how cut-throat Apple is with plugging leaks), but when it comes to some random large corporation... probably not. It's not even like any of the information that he provided could be construed by an outside person as a 'trade secret' either. On top of that, it's impossible for dcurtis to know what type of contracts Mr X has signed with AA or what their wording is (or even what the current enforcement policies are).

lionhearted 17y ago

> But I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it. Okay. I respect this tremendously, but... > When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid. ...then you've got to be ready for this. You're going to get it your whole life if you keep acting the way you're acting. It upsets people. They think you're acting out of your place, and you haven't put in your hours and earned your stripes and who the hell does this kid think he is? I went through a similar thing when I was younger and went into business. Here's one of my favorite quotes, it's by Bertrand Russel: "Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves." Okay, so step 1 - you've got to be willing to accept that you're going to provoke reactions like this if you keep acting as you've been acting, questioning authority and the way things are in a very confrontational way. And when people confront you, they won't fight fair and fight your arguments, they'll pull anything out of the hat they can to discredit you or get under your skin. It's going to happen more often rather than less as you go forwards. So if you can accept it, and keep on going, you can do some things. So I support you as someone who dropped out of high school and went into business quite young, and got called all sorts of nasty things too, and I admire you character. With that said: > Fixing AA.com would be ridiculously cheap and simple... This is where you go wrong. No, it probably wouldn't. You can get all the mileage you're currently getting, and a lot more credibility by changing that statement to, "Hell, maybe there'd be a lot of bureaucracy to cut through to fix AA.com and it'd cost some coin, but it's possible and it needs to be done." --> Lots more credibility. Doesn't lose much bite. When in doubt, fake the modesty. You'll get much more mileage out of life. Later you might learn that some things are more complicated than they initially appear, but you're going to get better mileage anyway if you sympathize with the difficulties people are likely to face trying to make change. And if you're a little extra nice and sympathetic, and it really would be cheap and easy, then your suggestions sound even more palatable. So - I'm with you, and keep on trucking man. Maybe add a touch of sympathizing with difficulties people face (guess/fake it if you can't see any potential difficulties) and your critique is much more likely to be received well.

dannyr 17y ago
I agree with lionhearted about earning your stripes. What have you done in the past that should make AA.com take your redesign seriously? There are a number of web entrepreneurs/hackers that I pay attention to. Some are young, some are old but I know they have paid their dues and earned their stripes.

SirWart 17y ago

I don't think anyone would disagree with you that AA has an awful site, but they seem to be reacting to how you phrased your criticism. If criticism is phrased in the wrong way, people will instinctively go into face-saving mode, and ignore the actual feedback ("Can you believe how arrogant this 21 year old is!"). I know this because I've had self-righteous outbursts due to my passion, but I've learned the hard way that it can sometimes rub people the wrong way and actually hurt your cause. (PS. I think 37signals did this sort of thing brilliantly: http://37signals.com/better http://37signals.com/better. Reading the copy just makes me feel warm inside and shows good emotional intelligence.)

potatolicious 17y ago

Fighting for great user experiences is one thing - what you did was not that. You called out the entirety of AA's online design department, called them names, and then proceeded to be smug and use the opportunity to be self-aggrandizing. If you really just wanted to fight what you thought was a terrible user experience, you would've brought up a list of usability concerns and optionally some remedies. You would not have called them names, you would not have called for mass firings, nor would you have gone into insane hyperbole. In this new age of online communication we as a society really need to find ways of remaining civil without seeing each others' faces. Working for one of the largest sites on the internet, I know first hand how difficult to get even a single usability feature pushed through - for good reason. A wholesale redesign would take a supreme amount of coordination, dedication, and effort, from multiple teams of people. It is anything but "cheap and simple", and your continuous insistence of this falsehood shows how little real experience you have in large-scale web dev. Failing to appreciate the complexities of an enterprise-scale website makes you inexperienced and perhaps ignorant. Failing to admit that there are complexities to an enterprise-scale website that you aren't aware of is being smug and arrogant.

pxlpshr 17y ago

So, I think you're a really talented designer, I don't entirely disagree with you, and I understand your frustration. However... Brand development is complex and takes years to develop. All this brand-strategy-through-design is fucking nonsense, stop drinking your own kool-aid. That's why I got out of the advertising industry and into consumer products. I'm sorry but designers are not that critical to a brand, and proclaiming such sounds extremely ego centric and naive. Furthermore, you're criticizing one of many sales channels and generalizing the entire company based on that. You can buy AA tickets through a variety of websites, retailers, travel agents, etc. -- not solely AA.com. In fact, I don't think I've ever bought an AA ticket on AA.com. When I read your response to Mr. X's response a few months ago, I was quite surprised that YOU were surprised about all the moving pieces in a big corporation. I think you lack quite a bit of business experience, and snail mailers aren't going to get you there. I caution you to think about your word choice when you say things like clueless and incompetence because you're branding yourself a millennial.

rantfoil 17y ago
I hardly think saying "This is the way we always do it" is a good enough reason to stop criticizing American Airlines. Designers may not have been critical to brands in the past (just buy authenticity through well-intentioned PR and ad placements)... But that will not be true in the future, and bringing attention to bad experiences is THE WAY designers can bring about a better world.
- pxlpshr 17y ago
  I wasn't implying that one should settle, but companies have life cycles too. The original people/passion that ignited the company moves on, retires, or dies. It happens all the time in every sector, it's good for capitalism to have this kind of churn. Fighting change in some big businesses is like trying to teach an old dog new tricks.
  - rantfoil 17y ago
    You're right that these things happen in cycles -- just like that "The Office is like the office" quote -- things get big and degenerate. But something about accepting it as unchangeable fact does not sit well with me.