Creating Controversy for its own Sake (and How Humility is a Rare Bird Indeed on the Web These Days)
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Back in May of this year, a then 21-year-old designer named Dustin Curtis wrote a blog post called Dear AmericanAirlines in which he redesigned (read: moved some pixels around in Photoshop) their homepage, called them names, called into question their business strategy, and then called for the firing of their entire design team, “[who are] obviously incapable of building a good experience.”
Setting aside the arrogance of an article centered on an unsolicited JPG of the easiest page of a site to tackle—he “spent a couple hours redesigning [their] front page”—I’m amazed that anyone purporting to be a professional interface designer would assume a night of Photoshop earns them the right to be smug. 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. It’s easy to look at their site versus your comp and go, “See, mine’s better. You guys must really suck at this.” Unsolicited designs, if they’re going to be done at all, should be communicated with class, humility, & a ton of research.
Andrew Wilkinson wrote a similar article recently redesigning the Zappos.com homepage and, while he was summarily ripped to internet shreds in this Hacker News thread, he was graciously responded to by Brian Kalma, the Director of UX/Web Strategy at Zappos. Wilkinson says stuff like, “I don’t know if your designers are using Photoshop 6 or what…here’s a tutorial to share with them.” Kalma responds with, “I appreciate your thoughts, your creativity and your care.” The company shows more humility than the designer, which speaks volumes about Zappos’ corporate culture and employees, and highlights a forgotten nugget of knowledge—there are real people on the other side of those sites.
Somewhere along the way on the web, a lot of designers and developers have abandoned common courtesy for condescending quips that drip with pride and ignorance. And these sorts of unsolicited designs, apart from their accompanying snarky commentary, would be interesting cases studies in what young designers think up, apart from the external factors affecting large sites. However, with the attitude they’re currently wrapped in, it’s hard to separate the message from the messenger.
But back to AmericanAirlines… apparently one of the UX Architects who worked on AA.com responded to Curtis’ article under the guise of “Mr. X,” talking about their process, how huge the team creating the myriad of AA.com content and functionality is, how it takes relatively no effort to create a homepage comp (”You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives.”), and how enterprise-level companies don’t turn on a dime. He closed with some specific details about upcoming improvements to the site and signed his letter “Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent)”
Only he did get fired. Even anonymous airing of corporate secrets is still a violation of most Non-Disclosure Agreements. And since little in corporate world is truly anonymous, it only took AmericanAirlines an hour to search their email servers, identify the guy, and show him the door.
Curtis posted The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X telling a bit of the tale. He says, “AA fired Mr. X because he cared…enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could.” No, they fired him because he violated his contract, in a very public way. His attempt to “clear the company’s name” made them look slow, dysfunctional, and incapable of internal communication between departments. Even if that’s all true, no company wants that image portrayed online by an employee. Employees can’t put their personal agenda ahead of the company’s agenda.
Companies with shareholders may very well be incapable of tolerating the openness and transparency so many social media folks clamor for. When every corporate decision you make influences the bottom line, in real time no less, you seek and destroy bad PR wherever it is found. They’re not clueless, they’re heartless—they exist to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. This isn’t horrifying; this is every day in most of corporate America.
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. The name-calling continues, as everyone blames the big, bad, clueless, hopeless company. Mr. X will likely land somewhere less corporate, where speaking his mind is welcomed and his designs will see the light of internet day.
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.
Full Disclosure: I was an Interactive Art Director for AmericanAirlines’ advertising Agency of Record in ‘06/’07
There are 76 Serious Comments
great article. thanks for being balanced: talented and humble. rare to see those things coexist. blessings-
Wow. Very humbling. Never looked at it in that light. Well done.
Interesting thoughts. Thanks for articulating them. I do disagree, however, that American Airlines can be given any leeway here. The site is a hideous piece of crap.
It doesn’t matter who yells at them or who gets fired, as long as it gets fixed. And bringing attention to the issue, I think, is a good thing.
There seems to be a lot of talk like this lately (Tom Watson recently had a post that shares some of your sentiments - http://tincorporated.com/writing/2009/nov/04/unfounded-anger/) and I am definitely in agreement with you. It’s sad there’s so much anger and controversy around.
Whoa. Mr. Blankenship. You are….so serious. I’ve not seen this side of your blogitude. And I respect it.
Having worked (for about 20 months) on two different but very similiar enterprise-level clients, you grow up somewhere between the age of 22 and the age of 26 to realize that there are politics, processes and legal departments in-play at large (and mid-sized!) corporations.
The ideal design solution is sometimes comped in a Photoshop layout by a designer, be it a blogger or a full-time employee looking to pad her book. But you cover it well: Accounting for things like “…metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale…” is no one-man task.
I’ve seen change come about for clients like these. And from the agency side. But it only comes from senior-level employees who care about their people first. Once they’ve empowered their teams to ask questions, they then solve problems. Ideas are born, must be sold and then implemented with the same breed of collaboration. And it will take many departments, team members and late nights.
Sean Berger
Thanks for the perspective. Great post.
While I agree with your sentiments, I question the need for you to expend energy saying what just about everyone following the incident already understood. You seem to have gotten on some kind of high horse to denigrate a 21 year-old for doing something obvious.
Actually, I take that back. What Dustin did was not obvious. I for one did not know about aa.com. It has been a long time since I went straight to an airline website to buy a ticket. I have been treated like shit many times by AA, and to see how unseriously they take their customer service is an important element in their crappiness. While I was already polarized against AA, Dustin’s little episode has made me decide to go out of my way to avoid this humanless waste of capitalism.
So one long comment later, I guess what I’m trying to say is: thank you for pointing out the relative trivialness of Dustin’s acts. Nothing ground breaking in what he did. But it did net AA one fewer customers, so it has had some kind of effect.
+1
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.
Yes, let us stifle peoples’ right to free speech for the sake of humility—on the internet no less. Your post is very well-written and you provide legitimate arguments, and I’m not saying I would approach the situation identically as Dustin has, but it’s a bit silly and hypocritical to openly criticize these gentlemen for their ideas.
The entire ordeal is fascinating to me from a communications standpoint; in seeing issues brought to the public light by individuals who intend to spread good taste by whatever means they know best. It reminds of the personal stories of brilliant young kids aspiring to be be successful entrepreneurs only to be told they won’t make it, or they don’t have what it takes.
I agree in what you took the time to say here, and I have a lot of respect for your effort, but I believe instead of simply complaining about the youthful overzealous behaviors, we should help them (not Dustin and Andrew specifically, but our—I’m part of it myself—generation) understand what behaviors will elicit favorable responses and to educate them on how to behave in a way that will contribute to the improvement of society, online and off.
I saw to hell with American Airlines for firing a person for reasonably discussing the situation. The good of the shareholders phooey. That’s just dehumanizing.
Very nice… I actually was thinking along the same lines as you when I read the blog too… What really stinks is that Mr. X felt the need to respond and did… in turn he got the boot… another thing that stinks is that the blogger was presumptuous, thinking he would solve AA’s site experience with one magical comp. Anyways, the professional courtesy of Mr. X and Zappos is pretty unreal. I applaud their packaging and it makes me think about how I can approach problem-solving and criticism in a more tactful way. Great post Joshua!
Dustin said, “It doesn’t matter who yells at them or who gets fired, as long as it gets fixed. And bringing attention to the issue, I think, is a good thing.”
Dustin you are a great designer, you obviously have the goods… but this statement shows how extremely arrogant you are… really? It doesn’t matter who gets fired? Are you freaking kidding me right now? So Mr. X maybe with some mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay gets the boot because he responded way better to you than you did to his work… and you think it’s OK. Dude, you seriously need to step back and take some consideration on the impact of how your opinion affects the lives of other people.
Way to go! Let’s see how many more people get fired because Dustin thinks their work looks like crap. Oh my bad… this your world and we just live here. Get some tact, man!
Too serious.
“… they exist to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. This isn’t horrifying; this is every day in most of corporate America.”
Yet any corporation that has this kind of focus instead of, y’know, what they actually -do- is going to lose for their shareholders; you don’t profit by focusing on profit — you focus on the product.
>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.
Are you new to the Internet? Poor behavior has been the rule for almost 15 years now.
Very well said. I think the majority of the problem lies in the tone that these redesigns were presented in rather than the idea of the open letter and redesign itself. All designers would agree that there are plenty of websites that are in desperate need of a facelift and presenting solutions to the design problems is a great issue to discuss. Both of the designers you mentioned in the post are excellent designers, just wish their approach was less degrading.
Yup. Great post. You’re right.
Thanks for the insightful, courteous commentary folks.
@Garry Tan - you seem to be mistaking “humility” for “shutting up and taking it.” That’s not true humility; that’s being a punching bag.
I simply mean a lack of pride and pretense. A knowledge that other people can, and often do, know more than you. By all means, as a designer (or any other profession) do great work, fight mediocrity, and call bad decisions out for what they are. But you don’t have to be a jerk about it to prove your point. Every time you are, you’re building a personal brand that you might not want to keep.
I like your post, but you have to take the spirit of the original article into question. Regardless of what should or shouldn’t have happened, American Airlines truly does have one of the worst websites for a company of its size. If you don’t already realize that, it’s because you haven’t been forced to use it.
The important distinction isn’t that some 21 year old kid used photoshop to mockup a screenshot… it’s that there are dozens of other websites that you can point to in the same field as AA which don’t suck. Look at Southwest, JetBlue, or United. These sites are based off of nothing more than common sense and split testing.
American Airlines almost purposely makes it difficult to even click a submit button. (By default, their submit button is aligned improperly and the “CLEAR” button is the one that is often highlighted.)
So, before you call anyone out for calling people out, please attempt to book a ticket on American Airlines in under three minutes. You’ll find that it’s a nightmare. That nightmare is probably what started all of this.
Firing someone who gives a crap and talks about his job outside the virtual walls of the business.
Yeah, I still have a problem with that.
Although, I’m happy this “Mr. X” doesn’t have to deal with an archaic and myopic company like AA anymore. Good for him.
This just in: young people are arrogant, breaking contracts gets you in trouble and people are rude on the internet.
This whole episode could stand a good shot of realism and some leeching of moral superiority.
The AA site is terrible. Pointing out that design by committee and lowest common denominator aesthetics produces a horrible experience isn’t a crime. Nothing wrong with this site has anything to do with “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.” The site frustrates the ability to buy a ticket and “creative direction” is at best absence and at worst horribly misguided.
It sucks that someone got fired because of this, but calling a company out on the carpet for their abysmal web effort is completely reasonable. It’s a shame they didn’t take this as a wake-up call, but I wouldn’t expect that awareness from them considering their less-than-stellar record of bad customer service and general incompetence.
I for one think your site needs a serious redesign and attached a Photoshop file to show you how it should have been done…
Not everyone can design. Many companies treat their employees poorly. Corporate America is warped treating shareholders as #1 and employees like crap. It is a sad state of affairs. I will not give AA my business.
fully agree, too bad Mr X got fired, I guess next time, he will keep in mind anonymous emails can’t be sent from your company desktop. Go out, create a junk yahoo mail and send whatever you want to send.
@Joshua — Reposting from Hacker News, but I think this goes a little deeper into what I mean around being a) uncompromising, and b) rudeness/disrespect can be an unfortunate outcome of being direct.
–
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.
What did Curtis do wrong, here? Mr. X committed suicide by blogger.
My opinion may be a bit biased here, as large, lumbering corporations that are more enlightened than AA pay for my time, which is sometimes spent telling them what they’re not seeing but might be “obvious” to savvy outsiders. They can be both infuriating and immensely rewarding to work with.
As a regular customer of AA, I’m quite certain they would only be infuriating. But also would never seek the advice of arrogant designers. Rather, their money is safer spent with the humble, khaki-clad consultants who will tell them what they want to hear while they steer their ship into irrelevance.
But maybe I’m missing the point because I’m too outraged about how negligent AA is in customer experience to be much worried about Mr. X’s “mistake”.
The logic that if it’s a big company and has:
- levels of hierarchy
- internal processes
- internal politics
- responsibility to shareholders first
then its ok to have poor public facing websites is rubbish.
The outrage here is that AA hasn’t addressed the problem of their website. They have the worst user experience out of any airline and I only use their site as a last resort.
AA should have seen what Mr X had to say and made changes to the site. Instead they have chosen to fire someone who could have improved the site, given the opportunity. Instead they have given Curtis more ammo to shoot at AA and their incompetent management.
Yet any corporation that has this kind of focus instead of, y’know, what they actually -do- is going to lose for their shareholders; you don’t profit by focusing on profit — you focus on the product. (jks)
What they do is make money. The way they’ve chosen to do it is to fly people from A to B on planes. The most important rule in business: stay in business. You don’t open up restaurants to give away food.
After some thought, what I believe I disagree with most about this whole situation is that it’s fighting against what I feel to be the most important aspect of true design: and that is problem solving. You (pejoratively) aren’t solving any issues or making anything better by screaming about bad design and yelling at a company for following through on their agreements with employees.
Mr. X knew he was going against his employers wishes when he publicly talked bad on AA. And that’s the point: he did talk bad about his employer. You talk bad about your employer, why wouldn’t you expect to get fired? It’s free market, and you don’t have a right to a certain job if you act against the previously stated and outlined rules of employment.
I’ve been a part of some rather large website endeavors, and regardless of how talented and willing your team is to effect change, it’s a huge undertaking and it doesn’t happen right away. It’s easy to design a comp, scream that it’s perfect, and then stand you’re ground on having the perfect solution. I’m all with Joshua on pointing out that there is much more to building an affective website than making it look pretty. It’s totally okay to have a poor public facing website, as much as we don’t want to admit it. Cough-cough… Google. It’s more than just the aesthetic.
Joshua, I agree with your stand on humility, but I’m surprised you take the side of the corporation in the firing of Mr. X. He didn’t make the company look bad, he just pointed out the facts regarding corporate design, of which most people in Dustin’s (and yours and my) world should already be aware.
If anything AA should have taken what Mr. X pointed out regarding the process and been humble, as a corporation, in their reaction and realized that maybe their process does suck and needs to change. Then maybe, just maybe, they could have turned this whole saga into something good. Instead they still look like the “slow, dysfunctional” organization they are.
Also, maybe you were just trying to be humble about it (and that is in no way a mocking tone), but it might be a good idea to provide full disclosure noting that you’ve worked on a brand pitch for AA before.
I’ve never questioned the premise—AA has a massively imperfect website, and could be infinitely better. I don’t think any designer would argue that. AA handles things in a free market, soulless corporate way. That they “just don’t get” how being open and honest in online communication can actually endear an individual to a big, soulless corporation. All that is true, but that’s not the point.
Do I, as a designer, have full knowledge of what it would take to undertake a project of that size and scope? No. And yes, as Sean Gaffney pointed out, I did a stint for the agency of record for all AA’s advertising (I’ve added a disclaimer), and I pitched, comped, met execs, and had work for them reach the public eye. And I still don’t come close to understanding the complexity of their needs online, how to best serve customers, and how to design to solve their specific internal issues. At least not completely. I couldn’t unless I worked for them.
And that’s where I’m coming from. When people lead with that kind of tone, but still say “I want to take a crack at this because I might have something valuable to offer even though I don’t know everything,” I would love to see what they come up with. When they lead with, “obviously you are all incapable, let me be your savior,” it makes them sound naive at best. That’s not web design; it’s a dead Photoshop file sitting on a screen.
American Airlines’ site obviously isn’t the product of split testing, etc… I think it’s much more likely that lots of different departments are clamoring for their piece of online real estate, which has resulted in the pile of unfocused garbage you see there. Not sure how the really poorly made forms came about, though…
I’m part owner of a very small software company. I’m hopeful that we’ll turn a profit of $30,000 or so this year. Let me put that another way: We will make $1,000,030,000 more than American Airlines.
I understand that complexity scales with the size of the business. It’s not that difficult to imagine the hundreds of layers of stakeholders and interests that are all exerting opposing pulls on the company’s website. I also understand that the ship is sinking.
If we can agree that a good website is a cornerstone of effective business for AA going forward, then it’s pretty obvious that someone needs to cut through the bullshit and make it happen. Saying “It’s complicated,” is at once true and insufficient.
There is a difference between understanding and tolerating, and I believe you conflate those to a certain degree. I get that Mr. X violated his contract, and why this led AA to fire him. Certainly, AA’s primary allegiance is to its shareholders. That’s why I would like this decision to be as painful for AA as possible—because that’s not how I want companies to act. I want to buy products from humans, not systems, or processes, or policies. I want to do business with firms who demonstrate reason, flexibility, and intuition. AA clearly did not demonstrate these things, since the negative PR for firing Mr. X has already far outstripped the potential harm of anything that he said. That they were unable to anticipate this easily predictable consequence just shows how far out of touch they are.
At the end of the day, “It’s complicated” doesn’t stop AA from hemorrhaging a billion dollars a year. Dustin appears to understand that, and AA doesn’t. And I’m supposed to think that he’s the one who doesn’t get it?
Resorting to ageism shows that you’re primarily interested in adding some more controversy to the pot.
Though your post is well-argued, I cannot agree with you. First of all, you dismiss the thought that went into Dustin Curtis’ AA page design rather rudely. Even if Curtis did this work in a few hours, it was still a few hours of his life that he donated to AA out of his passion for the company and for his art.
Secondly, the bottom line is that AA is hemorrhaging money, and no one disagrees that the site is terrible. This is, bottom line, the fault of the CEO, who is responsible for the entire company. The customer experience (be it web site or the flight itself) is one of the reasons for this, and cannot be dismissed.
Other companies (Apple) manage to do beautiful work with complex business structures.
Ron
“They’re not clueless, they’re heartless—they exist to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. This isn’t horrifying; this is every day in most of corporate America.”
Uh, that is completely horrifying actually. This horrible economic mess was caused by heartless bastards just like this who only cared about the bottom line and tried to make as much money as possible without regard to common sense, decency, humanity or anything else.
I think Daniel Mason managed to say about everything I would have in response. Regardless of who said what, why Mr. X got fired, or how justified American Airlines may have been, the failure here is one of communication.
All the cool kids know about the cluetrain manifesto (or at least know the central tenet)–markets are conversations: how you communicate with your customer base relative to how your competitors do determines the value of your brand. Your website, your public-facing people, your advertising, and what your stated values are all fall under the rubric of conversation. An increasingly-important part of the conversation is responding to high-profile people who say snide things about your company.
American Airlines has clearly signaled that they have no interest in being a part of that conversation, and as a result they’re signaling their own irrelevance in the internet sphere. If they were successful company with dominating market share and consistently exceeded their projected profit margins, I’d say bully for them. Except that they aren’t any of those things; they need to get engaged or expect to head roughly in the same direction–decrepitude and failure.
I wrote up my thoughts this morning before discovering Joshua’s post, and I have to say I agree with the perspective of the corporation:
http://www.webproducer.com/2009/american-airlines-redesign
A company like AA has millions of moving parts. To relegate it to doom based on the design of a home page (because really, no one has really dissected the actual purchase process here) or the dismissal of one employee/contractor is just shortsighted.
You’re clearly correct that a USER and someone with good design sense should in no way comment on a USER EXPERIENCE SUCKING.
I also appreciate your insight about how large companies should not be expected to rapidly root out problems with their user experiences, but instead ought rapidly root out any employee who actually cares about said good experiences.
Nice writeup. However I think that firing Mr. X was stupid on American Airlines and I think that American Airlines website is cluttered, hard to use and lacks focus. Sure they are a big company and getting things done is hard, but look at Apple they are a big company too but their website is awesome. Apple is lucky enough to have a CEO who care deeply about user experience, I guess American Airlines does not. If they were smart they would have promoted MR.X , hired Dustin Curtis to make over the site and changed their design culture to be one that puts usability above all else. This issue is not unique to AA though, I have worked at a few big companies and usability is usually a third or fourth priority when it should be the first. If a customer can’t use a website easily he is not going to buy no matter how many banner ads you flash in his face.
Well, Mr X should have had the brains not to send his exposé via corporate servers. He should have used his own private account.
Bravo.
I certainly don’t approach new business prospects screaming about how badly they suck. So, the point about humility is well taken. Its just a shame AA had none when it came to their own employee.
While I agree that there’s a lack of civility on the internet, I’m going to have to disagree on some other points. Yes, the designer was somewhat arrogant, overlooking the issues of a huge corporate website with a lot going on. And the employee was rather stupid to be sending things through his company email if he was going to be breaking his contract in doing so.
That said, AA demonstrated an ability to turn a minor marketing annoyance into a comparatively major one, and in the process lose an employee who was, at the very least, passionate in defending his company.
After all, what Mr. X did was say, in essence, “Hey, it’s not that easy–cut me *and my company* some slack. We know there’s a problem, and we’re working on it.” He didn’t say his company was incompetent, just explained that it was big and there was inerta at play. He defended a big company with relative passion.
AA was, at that point, within their rights to fire him, but someone in the chain of command should have realized that A) The guy was defensive enough of his company and their brand that he deserves to keep his job, and get a stern talking-to about interaction on public fora. and B) That firing him will cost them more business than it saves.
After all, is there ANYONE who is now more likely to fly AA after reading this story? I’m guessing not. There are, however, people who are substantially less likely.
So, instead of coming across as a company with good people willing to stick their neck out for it when they know something about the company needs work, they come across as clueless and draconian.
Also, this illustrates why so many of the more nimble, employee-oriented companies and/or companies that care about customers primarily, are doing well. It’s one way in which the tech industry has shaken things up in that way.
“This isn’t horrifying; this is every day in most of corporate America.” I disagree–it is horrifying, and it’s pretty much exactly what got the US economy into the wonderful place it is today. In contrast, I can name a number of employee-owned companies that are doing rather well even now.
If the original poster hadn’t suggested firing the entire AA design team, I might’ve replied to your retort in a harsher fashion. I do not like accepting any reality of slow-moving corporate chains of command where the Internet is involved. The reality itself is the problem and needs to be changed, stat, no ifs ands or buts, don’t care how many millions of moving parts — focus on solving the problem, not accomodating it. (I speak from experience.)
Oh well. Anyway. Next time, for your own sake, please omit the ageist remarks. It’s not nice, and people notice.
“…The site is a hideous piece of crap.
It doesn’t matter who yells at them or who gets fired, as long as it gets fixed. And bringing attention to the issue, I think, is a good thing.”
Dustin Curtis, you are arrogant and smug, probably a classic geek whose talents in one sphere are matched by a complete lack of social and empathic skills.
If you confuse doing a Photoshop mockup with working for a real client then I pity your clients. Actually I hope the next person to get fired is you.
Good of you to strike a blow for the world of faceless corporate middlemen. They are a downtrodden species and need all the support we can provide.
It is fascinating, however, to compare the description of how the AA design process works with the current Fortune magazine interviews about their businessman of the decade - Steve Jobs. The consistent theme is that emerges is one of a continuous pursuit of excellence, and of his ability to inspire the desire for excellence in his staff.
By contrast, the AA design process is one that clearly accepts and embraces mediocrity from start to finish. Yes, strictly they were within their rights to fire Mr X. But more than that they were making the point that to try to step out of mediocrity was unacceptable, and should be discouraged.
It is a cliché, but when there is an existing problem needing to be solved, defending the status quo (however correct you are in the detail of your points) merely makes you part of the problem.
I don’t think that referring to age is an issue here at all. This is an experience issue, and that’s something that is almost strictly gained with time, something which younger people don’t have, that’s just a fact. (The fact being young means not as much time lived.)
Joshua, I agreed with your main point– that it’s too easy to provide a quick website redesign without heed for the actual complex needs of the company– but also found it both obvious and a bit simplistic.
While you’re no doubt right, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all that this young, cocky designer offered a quick redesign that all of us older, more mature pundits and sages ‘know’ wouldn’t work. Really?
None of the disdaining posters here has ever displayed the least bit of confidence in his or her opinions and skills? None of you was ever a little cocky at 21? Hard to believe considering the freely judgmental commentary. You’ve always waited until you had every parameter, the last details of a design problem, before venturing pen to paper? I don’t think so. Cut the guy some slack.
As a web design consultant for AA you certainly had the opportunity to grasp the many interests going into its public website. (I imagine this is the case for any large company.) But most company front ends don’t suck! Most are relatively clear and simple, even those that must do a large volume of commerce on page one. What makes the difference, in the end? Management competence. Seeing the need to organize the parts of the company sensibly and then control them. Understanding why that leads to good customer service and ultimately to better stock performance. An organized, actively-managed company doesn’t tend to tie itself into ridiculous knots, as evidenced by the horrible mess of the AA website and the many conflicting, autonomous interests driving it.
Simply: As in design, a complex problem doesn’t necessarily mean a complex solution. Clarity in organization and process makes a better service or product possible; this in turn makes money.
(As an aside for the record, it’s hard to have much sympathy for the AA UX employee who got himself fired by responding to Dustin’s comments. At ten years in, he should have known better what he was dealing with and whether to keep his mouth shut.)
Just as Dustin Curtis’s redesign proposal is simplistic, so is your understanding of its larger significance. Of course he’s not going to change anything overnight with this cocky idealistic tactic. But frankly he probably has given AA something of real value (if they notice it) by putting this out there and sparking this discussion. It’s something I wish more designers had the balls to do. AA may well be too mired in its ways to see the writing on the wall anyway. But admit he’s seen something you hadn’t– and had the courage to put himself out there. How about a little humility on your part?
Excellent, well thought out article. You said all the things I was thinking when I read about this ‘controversy’ earlier today. But you actually put it out there in coherent sentences, which I guess is why you have a blog and I don’t.
Not sure why everyone is bowing down to Your Humbleness.
In Teh Intartubez, companies get a direct feedback channel that anyone can see and share in. It’s stark, and sometime brutal. Smart companies take advantage of that. Less-than-smart companies wallow in their corporate-ness, complain about their difficulties, make their customer’s experience a complete hell, and fire the employees they have that could make a difference. American Airlines and AA.com are obviously in the latter group.
It seems to me (disclaimer: totally unrelated outsider) that Mr X tried to mitigate the disaster by showing “Look, kid, you say we should be fired? We’re working in a slow process as are many employees in many large corporations,” not make it worse.
I tried to write more generally about the problems involved without calling out anyone, be it Dustin, X, Joshua, AA or even capitalist corporate culture.
(Just yesterday, before discovering this brouhaha, I did something similar to what Dustin did—not asking for anyone to be fired, but suggesting unsolicited improvements to a website design. We’ve all been young!)
I loved Dustin’s design concept for AA and thought it could serve as a good wake-up call for the AA design team. No need to feel offended, it was a just critique in my opinion. AA.com is functional, but it’s crap UX and aesthetics wise and could be improved immensely at low cost.
I actually wish AA hired Dustin as a consultant for a couple of months, but there is too much ego tripping going on both sides, so it’s unlikely to happen. Too bad, because Dustin’s mock-up is excellent. I bet you he could design the rest of the site just as well, just hire him to do so.
Anyway, it’s clear to me that in the rapidly developing world of the web we observe the clash of generations and a lot of young webbies know how get it right. For real. This, in turn, pisses the veterans off, the “founding fathers” from the ’90s.
I say go Dustin! Thanks to kids like you the web remains an exciting place to be and will be for the years to come.
Being a designer in a corporate environment is absolutely horrible. I work in NYC and have worked for corporate companies, smaller design studios and freelanced. The corporate company was by far the worst. Because every decision has to go through 20 people with pretty much no design/interactive experience everything ends up as shit. And you, the little UI guy have no say.
Damn I’m glad I got out of that mess. Sure it paid decently with decent benefits but it is so much more relaxing and fun working for smaller, creative studios.
Also, what a lot of people don’t under stand (@Vasilyn-above my last comment) is sure the design concept he did looks better than what they have now but the little UI guy has NO say whatsoever pretty much.
It’s a HUGE fucking process to get anything done in most corporate companies. It’s a big headache.
Resorting to ageism shows that you’re primarily interested in adding some more controversy to the pot.
—George Allport
Next time, for your own sake, please omit the ageist remarks. It’s not nice, and people notice.
—Jubal
As Aaron Martin pointed out, it has more to do with experience gained over time than it does to do with age. When I was 21, I thought I knew everything. I’m 30 now, and I know more, but I also realize there’s more to learn. That comes through experience, through working in a variety of environments, and from seeing how other people think.
Ageism would amount to “you are young, therefor your ideas have no merit.” That’s ridiculous, and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to do the same to me (as I still consider myself a youngster.)
I’m trying to make the point that “you are young, therefor you have much to learn, and should move forward in light of that, putting your ideas out there.” Again, I’m not making the argument that AA is right, that their website isn’t horrible, or that their way of doing business is absurd. I am saying that there’s more to those issues than a Photoshop mockup.
@D Oh, I know, I myself work as a UI dev/designer at a corporation. The little UI guy (if you are referring to Dustin) DOES have a TREMENDOUS say, as we can see reading through these posts and comments. The ripple effect will eventually catch on with AA and things will HAVE to change. It’s the power of the internet.
And I agree, getting anything relatively complex is a major headache in corporate environment. This is why we milk it for all its worth, suppressing our creative urges or channeling them otherwise, while doing personal projects on a side.
I have to say I agree with you about Dustin, but not about Andy Wilkinson. His article was nice, well put together, and friendly. And Dustin did not “just move some pixels around”, he really changed the site.
“I have to say I agree with you about Dustin, but not about Andy Wilkinson. His article was nice, well put together, and friendly. And Dustin did not “just move some pixels around”, he really changed the site.”
Are you kidding??? Andy Wilkinson just copied Dustin and tried to replicate his claim to fame.
“Companies exist to make money for their shareholders” is one of the primary half-truths that have ruined business culture for the past 30 years or so. Companies DO exist to make money, but they used to have to make money by providing quality goods and services to their customers. Somehow, the idea that “the shareholder is all that matters” sneaked in and and destroyed that.
If the shareholder is really “all that matters,” many companies like AA would be broken up and/or sold off for their assets. Some of them would probably deserve it (albeit I’d say it’s a stiff penalty for an offense as dicey as having a website that bothers some designer with a tad too much testosterone and way too little actual business-world experience.)
Anyone who worked with or on airline-booking systems in the days before the web knows that even the “shittiest” website is better than the good old days, when your travel agent needed a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages to understand the mainframe-based reservation system. The next time you check in for a flight, sneak a peek at the monitor that they’re using to confirm you and check your bags; you’ll doubtless be looking at a kiosk-style system running an old version of Windows and IE 5.5, pasted up as a thin veneer over the old mainframe system that’s still in service. I’d bet that most carriers don’t have customer-facing web 2.0 interfaces on their radar.
Besides, who in their right mind shops air travel tickets by going to the airline sites? The entire premise of the original critique is flawed by this glaring oversight: AA’s site doesn’t have to be usable by Dustin Curtis; it needs to be scrape-able by HotWire, Priceline, kayak.com, and several iPhone apps that are ALWAYS going to be better interfaces for consumers.
What you say makes sense, logically. But still, the fact is that AA fired an employee on the spot not because they were legally bound to, but for what they interpreted as disloyalty. The spirit of an ND agreement is primarily to prevent competitors from learning trade secrets. Here, it was wielded as a club to punish someone who dared open their mouth.
They were so busy ushering this guy out the door that they took no time to examine what he said and whether or not it was a legitimate critique. That says all you need to know about AA and why it’s in the state it’s in.
I’m sure Mr. X will realize, if he hasn’t already, that someone did him a favor here.
To “what?”. First off, I like that you are unwilling to be named. I can tell you are proud of your opinions.
Second, look at this logically. Dustin repeatedly attacked the design team at American Airlines. Compare: Dustin’s writing where he attacks the designers: http://j01.us/dc041377.png and Andy’s: http://j01.us/232ba04e.png. I think it’s quite clear which one believes the design team is incompetent. Second, Andy actually compliments the design team: http://j01.us/be1f6ac2.png.
J-P
Joshua, I am glad that you have created a thread that supports the idea that a designer is looking for attention merely by ripping on other brands. Thanks for the post. I agree with you.
cv
I wrote more about this here: http://jpteti.com/2009/11/creating-more-controversy/. Yes this creates more controversy.
Great post - It’s nice to hear a retrospective told in a way that doesn’t involve spin.
I don’t know. I’m personally on Dustin’s side here. He presented a redesign as a rough proof of concept, and even admitted that it was “just pushing pixels around in Photoshop.”
However, you seem to be ignoring the elephant in the room, that the customer experience on AA.com (and the airline in general) is simply awful. User feedback seems to confirm this — AA are consistently reviewed as one of the worst US airlines, and their passenger numbers are falling like a stone.
Dustin seems to be calling it largely as it is. AA is a huge, monolithic corporation that is enormously out of touch with both its employees and its customers. Their web presence clearly reflects this.
Dustin’s sin wasn’t attacking AA, it’s that he attacked our side: the UX team inside AA who were fighting to achieve the same goals, and his arrogance brought down one of our own. On that level, humility is absolutely called for. Without solidarity and respect among designers, we won’t achieve our goals.
At the same time, we should remember the slogan from the 60s: be realistic - demand the impossible! The fact is that organizations design by committee because designers don’t have the appropriate level of decision-making power, and this needs to change. The only way that this is going to change is by ruthlessly asserting the superiority of design (as a discipline!) in doing design.
Engineers have Dilbert and the Pointed-Headed Boss. Designers needs a story like that to mock and marginalize.
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
This is an excellent article. I feel that while Dustin and Andrew are pointing out some legitimate poor and/or dated designs, they should instead be exercising their consumer rights.
No one made Dustin fly on AmericanAirlines, or Andrew shoe-shop Zappos. I think it’s fine to air your opinion of a site, or even mockup a proposed redesign. But both of these articles assume designer influence is stronger than consumer influence, and when it comes to the corporate world that isn’t true.
These corporations are looking at the bottom line, i.e. people giving them money. Of course designers care about the particulars of a website design/interface, but AmericanAirlines doesn’t care about designers. They’re concerned with consumers.
Of more interest to them would be a random blogger of relative prominence saying something like:
“I was looking for a flight yesterday on AA.com, and I had such a terrible time. One of my friends recently mentioned how satisfied they were with a flight on Virgin America. I went to their site, and was so impressed. I had the perfect flight booked in minutes. It was such a great experience!”
If you want to affect a corporation, you need to be a consumer before you’re anything else.
One thing to add, that’s maybe worth saying to people who cares about design or user experience, is: if someone produces a mockup to show how “it’d be better if so-and-so did this”: one should always be critical of whether that mockup is a “real design for a real world” or just an idea or sketch / mock-up.
Sketching / mocking-up redesign ideas can be good for lots of things: suggesting alternative approaches, starting a conversation, breaking out of legacy approaches, imagining a better world, etc.
But, it’s also possible to fall into a trap of thinking mockups are obviously going to “work better” because they obviously “look better.”
At some point, one always has to ask the questions: could this company really do this? could this designer really follow through with all the design details? could this designer and this company work together to make it really happen across all the details?
If the answer is “no” to any of those questions, then it’s useful to recognize that the mockup is a fantasy–which is totally fine–but remember it’s fantasy.
I enjoyed your coverage and commentary here.
From my perspective the positive thing with all of this is that people are talking about the obstacles that prevent the world from looking at prettier things. That is the area the community should focus on and rally around. I have to applaud Dustin and Andrew for not just speaking their mind, but for having a solution. That is extremely rare!
Andrew wrote about the site I work for, Zappos.com. And as I noted in my response to him (http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2009/09/16/an-open-letter-response-to-youre-killing-me-zappos) I believe he hit on all the right design principles, but did not address the “why” behind his solutions. Design at Zappos is a verb, it is a process to solve a variety of problems. if a company goal (let’s say Apple) is to always have aesthetics be a primary factor then it will be so. For Zappos, we have clearly not gotten there yet. Our focus has been in areas that will eventually enable better experiences, we are laying the framework.
Let’s just remember this: all companies (and their sites) have a target audience and have very specific goals. I like to think that we all design to achieve goals, not to make other designers smile. That would be too idealistic.
Love,
Brian Kalma
I like your view.
To me, the interesting part of this whole story is how American Airlines is handling it, and how it will affect their business.
My complete comment on my blog:
http://www.zlok.net/blog/2009/11/14/branding-is-more-than-a-logo/
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On Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 5:49pm Aaron said —
I totally agree.