

Response to Dustin Curtis from AA UX person - ojbyrne
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

======
sanj
This reminds me of why I abhor "concept" designs that people photoshop up to
look like the next generation iPhone/iPod/Mac/Telsa.

They have always struck me as a giant waste of time. Without knowing any of
the engineering or business constraints, they're an exercise in academic
masturbation.

The remind me of drawings I did when I was 6 about my awesome car that did
everything: flamethrowers, wings, scuba gear AND 3459798345 miles to the
gallon.

~~~
raganwald
_There are no business constraints._ None. That expression is an illusion, a
way peopel have of rationalizing their inability to make change.

There are no business constraints forcing peopel to make poor decisions. There
are just people making poor decisions. In a big company making a collectively
poor decision you have a larger aggregate of people making poor decisions. But
they are still people making poor decisions, and there are no inviolable
constraints, no laws of physics that prevent the company from making good
decisions in aggregate.

The UX designer says wait 12-18 months for a redesign. Why didn't they
redesign the site 12 months ago so we could see it today? One or more poor
decisions twelve months ago, that's why.

Other companies like ING and Apple get it, which tells me that There are no
constraints, no laws, just people who zigged when they should have zagged.

If Dustin wants to shout that the emperor has no clothes, I'm happy with your
ad hominem suggestion that he's a six-year old boy. Maybe that's what
companies like AA need, a little boy to say "You could have everything, happy
customers, an understandable web site, AND 3,459,798,345 in profits instead of
losses."

~~~
abossy
"Other companies like ING and Apple get it, which tells me that There are no
constraints, no laws, just people who zigged when they should have zagged."

Apple would die if it's design wasn't the best in the industry. They "get it"
because their competitive advantage is precisely that -- design.

I don't know a whole lot about ING, but it sounds like they similarly succeed
by being the counter culture. They are, in fact, so specialized, that they're
willing to turn away customers that withdraw money from their savings accounts
too frequently. The point is, they're experts at what they do, and that's how
they survive, the same way Apple survives by being the design expert for
devices.

AA has to reinvent itself to become an expert. There are, no doubt, a lot of
obstacles, constraints and laws, but their desperation will lead them to
success.

~~~
wallflower
In the documentary film "Objectified", Dieter Rams (former chief designer for
Braun) specifically calls out Apple as one of the only companies around today
that takes design seriously.

------
ryanwaggoner
Great letter by the UX guy, but I feel like Dustin completely missed the
point. I know it's tempting to go the 37signals route and turn this isolated
example of [what he considers to be] a poor website into a rant on how big
businesses just don't get it, have bad taste, hate their customers, etc. The
problem is that it's just not true. It _might_ be true for AA, though I'm not
convinced, but there are lots of examples out there of big profitable
companies with terrible websites that have lots of customers who love them
anyway. This whole fiasco feels like another case of a web professional
viewing the world from inside their bubble.

Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps you're just not in their target
market? A lot of people who commented on the last post seem to really like
them for frequent business travel...just because they don't cater to the
casual market doesn't make them a bad company. On the contrary, focus is good.

Oh, and this was my favorite line:

 _Companies like this just float along, in the background of capitalism,
exchanging goods and services for money._

Yeah...turns out that exchanging goods and services for money is kinda the
foreground of capitalism. You might think it's about having a pretty
website...it's not.

~~~
potatolicious
Personal anecdote here: I've _never_ had any trouble booking a ticket through
AA. Furthermore, the state of the American airline industry is such that
nobody flies a "preferred" airline, everyone just flies whatever is cheapest.

So, unless your website is actively chasing users away (which I doubt, it's
not _that_ poor), you'd be better served keeping your costs down than making
some great Web 2.0 gesture of redesign.

~~~
modoc
Well, maybe not _everyone_. My two favorite domestic carriers are Virgin
America and JetBlue. If I can take one of them to wherever I'm going, I will.
Now my liking them isn't based solely on their website design, however I
invite you to check out <http://www.jetblueairways.com/> and
<http://www.virginamerica.com/> and compare them to AA.com. The attention to
design and customer experience that they show in real life, on the flights, is
also exposed on their websites, imho.

They're also some of the few profitable US domestic airlines as far as I know.

~~~
madh
Southwest is profitable. (They did some intelligent fuel hedging.)

------
zcrar70
Welcome to the Real World (Of Large Corporations), Dustin...

~~~
dcurtis
You mean the real world of _crappy_ large corporations. Plenty of large
companies are not run this badly. At least I hope they're not.

~~~
jaxn
I am really impressed by AA's response.

What is the largest team you have worked on?

I read the letter and your reply. I love the Ira Glass series on taste as
well, but do you really want your business analyst to have great taste? I
mean, it might not hurt, but I can't imagine making that a job requirement.

AA is not in business to make pretty websites. They are in business to
effectively get people from point A to point B. Their website is effective.
Your mockup is not as effective for some of the ways I interact with AA.com.

~~~
dcurtis
An interface is just a transporter to help you get from where you are to a
place where your goal is completed. That's it. There are varying levels of
"effectiveness" in transporting you, though, and that's where the quality of
the interface comes in.

For example, AA's current website is "effective" in the same way it is
effective to travel 50 miles from here by walking. But what if you gave me a
bike? What about a car?

AA is in the business of giving their customers an enjoyable experience. They
just happen to transport them via airplane as their business. Or at least
that's how a customer experience designer should look at it, I think.

And stuff like this is just totally unacceptable:
[http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Photoshop-20090522-08344...](http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Photoshop-20090522-083441.jpg)
.

~~~
jaxn
You are wrong.

On the front page of AA.com I can log into my frequent flyer account without
having to click to go to a login form.

Being able to select a date with the calendar is much more effective when
trying to make plans three months out. Parsing unstructured data from text
fields is "cool" but increases ambiguity for the majority of users.

What if I want to buy a ticket with points or want to only see flights that
have first class available? You're design is going to require me to fill out
two forms (or toggle filters at some point).

The AA.com website is not perfect. However, it is effective in ways your
mockup is not.

Your position is extremely arrogant and I doubt that you have the experience
to back it up.

~~~
dcurtis
My mockup isn't perfect, and it wasn't intended to be. Your questions and
requirements are all valid. Considering the current site acceptable is what
bothers me.

~~~
myoung8
I agree that AA.com is a terrible experience, but consider the decision to
redesign the site from a business perspective: will making it an order of
magnitude more usable increase AA's bottom line by more than some other
project they are considering (e.g. opening a new destination)?

I don't know the answer to that, but AA is run by business people so I would
wager that the answer is "no," otherwise they would be doing it already.

I think there are some intangible benefits to having a more usable website,
but those are intrinsically difficult/impossible to measure so they don't
factor into the business decisions.

As a designer, I feel your pain, but the unfortunate reality of the situation
is that AA is driven by their bottom line and a more usable website probably
won't net them the greatest ROI right now.

~~~
pg
GM is run by business people.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I don't think he's arguing that business people don't make mistakes, just that
they take a more holistic view of the various options to improve the bottom
line, rather than just looking at one extremely narrow slice of a multi-
billion-dollar multi-national company.

I would rather have "business people" running GM than someone who thinks that
redesigning the GM website will solve all their woes...or any of their woes.

~~~
pg
In GM's case the corresponding thing would not be to redesign their site but
to redesign their dealer network, which would actually be a really good idea.

~~~
jaxn
Which brings up an important piece of information that we are missing.

What percentage of AA's bookings come from their website, and what percentages
come from travel sites like expedia or from travel agents. I know a large
number of AA's customers are business travelers.

If 10% of bookings come from the website and they are able to increase it's
effectiveness 50%, that would only result in a 5% increase in sales.

------
karzeem
Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy
companies are teams of talented individuals.

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

~~~
Maciek416
"Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy
companies are teams of talented individuals."

I agree. I've worked in situations almost exactly like the one described in
the reply, and at least one well-known public website redesign that many
readers of HN have seen.

When I first saw Dustin's rant a few days ago I just shook my head and said
"he's probably never worked in a design agency that serves fortune 500
companies where this sort of stuff happens". The amount of political willpower
and organizational strength required to pull off a total redesign in most
fortune 500 companies or governmental agencies is tantamount to moving
mountains. These are the type of organizations and client/agency relationships
where the font size on a single button on a form in a "contact us" page can be
debated for weeks, where talented designers sit in boardroom conferences till
2AM listening to teams of hundreds of people all throw in their 2 cents
instead of actually working on the design that's being discussed.

The thing (that you allude to) about the design agencies that get these kinds
of contracts that's interesting is that they are full of exactly that:
talented fantastically creative individuals. And when a team like the one I
worked on finishes a massive redesign that gets covered across the web,
there's a feeling of utter failure because the final product that makes it out
is never even close to what could have been. Corporate politics reduce it to a
mere shadow of that. At the same time, a feeling of relief and accomplishment
for having just finished the damned thing and navigated the barbed wire mess
of insanity that it takes to deliver such a thing.

Next time you see a designer with a multinational bank, airline, consumer
products & goods company, automotive company, government agency, etc, in their
portfolio, ask about the emotional scars ;).

~~~
bdotdub
I'm very curious why, as a talented designer, would you want these contracts?
I mean I understand that I'm sure there is plenty of potential to do something
great and I'm sure large companies compensate very well, but don't the
inanities of meetings that take forever deter you from wanting to work on
these jobs?

I guess what I'm saying is that if I was a talented designer, I would want to
work on things I enjoy, namely designing, and not having to deal with
corporate bureaucracy. For every large corporate contract, there must be many
more interesting projects out there. (or am I being a naive millenial? :)

~~~
Maciek416
I'm not sure, I often ask myself how I ended up in those situations as well
(I'm a coder FWIW) and I still ask many designers working on projects such as
these why they're doing it. The simplest answer seems to be that it just seems
like the most natural place/industry for designers to gravitate to, and once
they're there, they're kind of stuck in a tunnel. Coders have it a bit easier
in that the path to starting their own thing or hopping between industries is
much much shorter and easier.

BTW I don't think you're being naive at all, I think these are very good
questions to ask.

------
abi
Great article! John Gruber makes a very similar point in his talk "Auteur
Theory of Design" [1]. His thesis is that "the quality of any piece of work
always approaches that of the decider (i.e the autuer)".

Also see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur>

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ>

------
swombat
Seems like a bit of a contrived argument. I think the more plain, more boring,
but more realistic explanation is the one given in the letter from X. The
reason the website looks like it is is because of the politics involved in
building it. When someone has maneuvered the corporate landscape for a year to
get a slice of the homepage, you're not going to be able to overrule them just
on the fact that "it's bad design".

I'll agree that there's something self-destructive about the culture in many
large corporations, but I don't think it's entirely down to the CEOs... I
believe it's more like a natural emergent quality of large corporations.

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

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

more on this:

<http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information>

<http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise>

------
sethg
_At the AA annual shareholder meeting yesterday morning, Mr. Arpey said the
company is "taking efforts to improve customer service". I think this is a
shortsighted goal. AA should take efforts to improve the whole customer
experience._

Yes yes yes yes yes. "Customer service" is the _backstop_ to the rest of the
customer experience; when a customer has to go to "customer service" to get
something done, every other department should see it as _their failure_.

My father recently took a trip on United, and when he was checking in at the
airport, the check-in system asked him if he wanted to change his seat. So he
did. And after it was too late for him to change back, he discovered that
because he had changed into a first-class seat, he was being charged an
additional $150.

Now, to United's credit, someone at the airport told him who he could email to
ask for the charge to be reversed, and when he sent that email he got a prompt
response along the lines of "since you did sit in that first-class seat you're
not eligible for a refund, but we'll give you your money back anyway". But
wouldn't it have been better for everyone concerned if United had designed the
workflow on those kiosks so that even a sleep-deprived 70-year-old man in the
world's second-busiest airport would not have made that mistake in the first
place?

~~~
gfodor
An even better question would be if they had the means to discover, capture,
and document his frustration. You can't fix something you can't measure.

~~~
dcurtis
Ha, that's what I'm working on right now at Frogmetrics.com. We're a YC-funded
company, and our goal is to try and help some of these enterprises understand
customers better so they can better the customer experience.

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

------
zwieback
I'm not so sure I like the airy new iPhone-ified GoogleTwitterGrooveshark
style of interface that much better. Maybe AA.com could add that as a front
end for simple transaction and have an "Advanced" option to go to the
cluttered kind that gives you all the options.

Does anyone remember the old SABRE interface travel agents used? They didn't
need any colorful icons, just an IBM terminal and a few uppercase letter codes
would get you there. Sometimes putting a simple interface onto a complex
system is not right for everyone.

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

------
edw519
"The reason most large companies have bad design is because they are run
poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave
like its lowest common denominator."

Quite a leap, Dustin, from a company that lost $2 billion last year to "most
large companies". Many large companies are in fact run very well.

The biggest difference between small and large companies in getting excellent
work done? (Broad generalization, of course...) In small companies, problems
are more technical; in large companies, problems are more people. As your
emailer pointed out, a team of 200 can tackle almost any technical problem,
getting it done with all the people and politics is another story.

That's why I've always preferred small companies. It's a lot easier to focus
on the task at hand.

~~~
dcurtis
Ah, what I meant to say was "The reason big companies with bad design are the
way they are is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies
that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator."

~~~
gills
You sort of have a point, but it's not just about the top. Ending up with bad
design (be it websites, airplanes, processes, packaging, whatever...) requires
the complicity of and/or lack of political aptitude by the folks at the lower
levels, "in the trenches" so to speak.

One can achieve good design even when the warring factions of management above
you can't make it a priority. But it is much more difficult in such an
organization, because you must often personally get buy-in from a diverse set
of teams and then walk the line with management just right -- pull it off in a
way that makes them all look brilliant without stepping on any toes. It can be
done but it takes perseverance and political aptitude beyond what most big
company employees are willing to commit to their jobs.

------
shalmanese
Something I've been advocating for a while to UX people fresh out of school is
that the design bit of their job is really the easiest and least important
part of what they do. UX is about process which means it's about navigating
politics and procuring buy-in and being able to communicate across a broad
range of cultures.

If you're the only one championing the message of usability & design, then you
might get some limited short term success but you will inevitably leave and
things will decay back into the ground state.

Instead, the correct goal for a UX person should be to instill a culture of
usability within a company and act as a facilitator for the people who are
building the products.

University HCI courses emphasize the technical skills almost exclusively
because that's what they're good at but what they end up doing is graduating a
bunch of bright, talented people who unfortunately don't have the temperament
to play the office politics necessary.

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

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

~~~
mikecuesta
Not according to this man's post:
<http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html>

~~~
bdotdub
Well, I don't think they had a big stress on design, but they've managed to
keep their culture and still keep the bar high. From what I understand,
engineers are still king at Google and great ones have freer reign to work on
interesting things

------
10ren
_that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great
things_

------
ahoyhere
The core of this issue:

Big[1] companies tend to collapse under their own bureaucracy.

Executives either don't really care, don't hear about problems, or don't trust
anyone enough to delegate power to someone who _would_ care (or they are
incapable of hiring people who do care / are trustworthy)

Middle managers don't get rewarded for risks that succeed, they are motivated
mostly to CYA

Committees are inherently unproductive, and become "scorekeeping grounds" for
petty people who are in otherwise denied any power

Jobs are staffed with people who won't rock the boat because the reward for
rocking the boat doesn't offset the downside of getting fired

Everybody down to the "productive" employees (somebody who might actually
redesign the site) gets so whipped and dispirited that they tell themselves
that this is how The Real World is.

Turtles all the way down... apathy, self-deception, excuses, and groupthink.

[1] I say big, but at one job, I saw this happening in a team of about 20. It
really depends on the individual group's inclination towards buck-passing and
bet-hedging

