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71 Comments
- kanojo1969, on 06/02/2009, -3/+26yeah, I used to be the sort of jerk who would whip up a front page in half an hour and berate people with it. but reality just isn't like that, and the reply from the AA designer is 100% correct. it's also very easy to point at someone like Apple and say, 'that's how you do it', but Apple isn't *anything* like AA. AA has thousands of products, and customers across every conceivable demographic.
The sheer number of 'stakeholders' in anything related to the aa.com front page means you can never, ever do anything dramatic. The only possible solution is if someone very high up, most likely the CEO, gets a bee in his bonnet about it and makes it a personal crusade. Otherwise you will be beating your head against a brick wall.
Apple from day zero was a totally different kind of organisation than AA. Getting a decision on a design issue could be as simple as getting jobs' ear at the right time of day and he'll sign off on it. End of Story. If you don't realise how soul-destroying getting the same sign-off in a large old-fashioned corporate like AA is, just thank your lucky stars and hope you never do. It's brutal.
Anyway, where was the long reply? Are you telling me that our literacy has degenerated to the point where someone apologises for sending an email of 3 paragraphs, and it's length is something worth noting in the accompanying article?
That's far, far sadder than the abortion that is AA.com. - Leonffs, on 11/20/2009, -2/+24American Airlines.. 1999 called, they want their website back.
- yongfook, on 06/02/2009, -4/+20***Reposting my response here because Fastcompany stripped all the line-breaks...
Disclosure: I'm a designer, programmer and have worked at large global ad agencies and small web production houses on projects with scale similar to this.
I'm on AA's side on this one.
Yes, Curtis' design is prettier - much prettier. But better? In what sense? Is the purpose of the AA site to look pretty or is it to drive sales of airline tickets?
It seems that all this design succeeds in doing is getting rid of visual clutter. I think it's pretty arrogant of any designer to assume that the "better" design is one where the designer simply removes stuff they deem unimportant, ignoring any business parameters the company might have. Curtis doesn't have any of the metrics associated with this site at his disposal, so his design is tantamount to an hour's worth of attractive guesswork. When you're talking about a sales platform at a corporation as large as this, metrics and numbers are always going to trump some designer's "hunch", whichever way you dice it.
As a possible example - removing the "Featuring" banner ads and the "Fare Sale Alerts" sections is all fine and dandy when you want to fit your design around some requirements that you conjoured out of nowhere, but you'd probably hit a brick wall *fast* working with a client like this when they tell you that those ugly little banners and alerts are "actually driving sales, Mr Curtis". You'll need to show that your minimalist approach is going to earn them more money ("oohs" and "aahs" from appreciative fellow designers don't translate so well into revenue for AA) than their current approach which caters for various types of end user - people looking for a cheap deal, people looking to maximise air miles - as opposed to Curtis' approach which is really only appropriate for one type of end user; the kind who just wants a ticket.
In summary: no offence to Curtis, but this is just design masturbation - nobody can really make any kind of informed decision about a huge overhaul like this without communicating with various business departments and doing an absolute *boatload* of testing.
Curtis' design could happily be adopted for a less entrenched player though - think small regional carriers whose margin for error regarding web sales is much lower.
I will give Curtis some credit though - he has probably started a conversation over at AA, and that's better than nothing :) - webadelic, on 06/02/2009, -0/+11The new design is very nice, clean and simple..What a great link bait and free marketing !
- MonkeyNews, on 06/02/2009, -0/+9It is pretty naive to ask why on earth a massive conglomerate like AA has such an "embarrassing" homepage. Like the AA designer said, it is a piece of cake (and a little arrogant) to swan in and redesign an entire homepage top to bottom and then insult the original.
I can't even begin to imagine the amount of ***** red tape and gatekeepers you would need to pass to add a new link or chance a menu on the page. It would easily take weeks or months. The fault here is with the restrictive company infrastructure. Saying "lolz ur site belongs in 1999!" is cute - but it's not based in reality.
The BBC redesigned their site a while back and I was impressed by the radical changes in some areas. Some people still hate it, but at least it is an example of a massive and company slowly changing their views in regards to design and allowing the designers to make choices. - MonkeyNews, on 06/02/2009, -1/+9The full "long reply" is found here: http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
To be honest the guy seems like a bit of a douche. Read his bit on the receipts at Starbucks - It reeks of the pretentious artsy types who seem to be really out of touch - http://dustincurtis.com/two_stories.html - binaryalchemist, on 06/02/2009, -2/+9They sell a service, and an experience. Design is absolutely central to an airline - from the website, to the ticketing process, to the boarding process, to the airplane interior design - every interaction with the customer needs to deliver the right experience. Airlines who don't get the need to delight and reassure their users, and to be design-agile, are always going to be troubled in a competitive market.
- realdcurtis, on 06/03/2009, -0/+5I am extremely surprised that you, of all people, would have this position. From the designs of your websites, I'd think you would understand the value of good customer experiences.
Sure, my mockup isn't perfect. And it wasn't intended to be. I was working with the "I want a pony!" scenario, which is mostly design masturbation. But there is absolutely no excuse for the horrid monstrosity of a site that AA.com has. For example, it would take at most an hour to fix/enlarge the comically tiny 10x5px squares that make up the "go" and "continue" buttons. And that small change would make the site much more usable.
I'd really like to chat with you about this, can you send me an email? - arvaris, on 06/02/2009, -0/+5News Flash - almost all CEO's, chairpersons, decision-level project managers, and yes even most CTO and CIO's have absolutely no taste when it comes to web design. They want direct marketing (ie: tons of ads), and could give a crap about user experience. It's because user experience on the web is "relatively new", especially to the really old people that usually hold these positions. Anyone who doesn't understand why AA's site is so terrible has obviously never worked for a large corporation, where creativity goes to die. They only way the upper echelon ever sees the light is when they pay consultants $300/hour to come in and tell them what you've been saying for years.
- Navicerts, on 06/02/2009, -0/+5It's true. I design user interfaces of several types and they always look good until the users get to put in their suggestions :)
Then there is always that 1 manager that demands on some terrible addition that no one wants but he is the boss. Sometimes I just make a temporary copy of the page/program for the boss that gets dropped when implementation comes (as long as their are no functional differences from my and the users point of view, e.i. only when his change actually makes it *worse*). - kanojo1969, on 06/02/2009, -0/+5I used quote to imply that the term 'stakeholder' is the sort of new age corporatespeak that has turned large corporates into brain-dead zombie companies.
And your train analogy is dumb, there noting positive about the unwieldy mess that is big company organisation. Even with all their inertia, AA could almost certainly not produce a decent website, even if they tried to.
You've really missed the whole point. - dazparkour, on 06/02/2009, -1/+6I'm talking about the company. The company created the red tape.
So what if the design department didn't. It must be someone's job to make sure red tape does not get in the way of work and if it isn't, guess what - that IS their fault. - dazparkour, on 06/02/2009, -1/+6I don't see why it's a problem.
The ***** red tape isn't something that fell on them from on high - it is something they themselves created. Procedure is supposed to smooth processes over, once they become preventative it IS fair to say so.
If they created so much red tape that there is a problem then they should work on removing it. Why not? You can't just say "oh them big, so red tap". It had to come from somewhere. It can be changed. It is not the red tape of God. - fuzzmello, on 06/02/2009, -0/+4"Well for one thing, Bob, I have eight bosses. That means every time I do something wrong, I have eight people telling me about it."
- jsmithers, on 06/02/2009, -0/+4THIS IS *EXACTLY* why Microsoft's products are so terribly, terribly engineered - the design-by-huge-committee process which paralyses all rational design processes and thought. It reached it's logical conclusion in Vista, a product so extremely bad that it reduced PCs that had the power of supercomputers of a few years ago, to the speed and efficiency of a home computer of the early 80's, except machines running Vista were even LESS usable.
Something amazing and good has happened with Windows 7 though, and you can bet it's due to a radical internal restructuring of Microsoft's Windows engineering teams.
Oh, and if you think I'm just trolling? Multiple current and ex Microsoft staffers have attested what I say is true. - MelvinSchlubman, on 06/02/2009, -0/+4> a user makes up his/her mind in less than 5 seconds. You'd think companies would embed that in their culture by now.
Some individuals get it; but one problem is too many cooks in the kitchen. Each interest group demands prime real estate on the home page, and designers aren't allowed to push back in the interest of the company overall. Root cause: bad management. - merimeet, on 06/02/2009, -2/+6So basically, in order to keep peoples jobs, we need to maintain ugly websites..?
No wonder airline ticket prices are so high.. They have a whole website design staff, and each one of them needs to get paid.
Maybe I took this article wrong. But that's what I see. - mohsenxp, on 06/02/2009, -3/+6Website design has little to do with product design. Two completely different departments infact.
- moeriscus, on 06/02/2009, -1/+4One advantage of AA's totally broken web site: it forces people to call and book their flights over the phone, allowing AA to charge $20 for the privilege of speaking to a human being.
I had to book three international flights last week through AA (was using frequent flyer miles); after running into error messages on Chrome, Firefox, and IE, I gave up and had to eat $20 for each flight booked. Good times.. - zip000, on 06/02/2009, -0/+3The problem with this guy is that he is so focused on the design of the website, he doesn't realize that there is a lot more going on with the company that its website design. The important point is that the website works; how it looks is secondary. I'm not saying that it is unimportant, because design certainly is important towards improving the customer experience and increasing positive feelings about the company, but with something like booking a flight, you don't want it to look like a blog or another wordpress site. You want quick information that seems accurate. His design looks a lot cleaner, but it is missing a lot of the apparent functionality of the real site.
Also, changing a website for a large company is necessarily going to be a slow process. I run the website for a small organization, and I get blow back whenever I make even the smallest changes - if anyone notices that is. - dazparkour, on 06/02/2009, -1/+4You could say AA sells tickets.
You can't buy tickets on their website? - mohsenxp, on 06/02/2009, -1/+4I had an exam on organisational restructure and change last week! If only I had seen this to use as a real life case study!
It still amazes me how many cluttered websites exist today! I thought the golden rule was the a user makes up his/her mind in less than 5 seconds. You'd think companies would embed that in their culture by now. Saddening. - idc5, on 06/02/2009, -0/+3I'm sure this also explains the design process for many of the cars from American companies.
- noahhoward, on 06/02/2009, -0/+3As a web designer and programmer for the US Government I feel his pain. I get 'design direction' from many different people, my supervisors are not designers, I have to deal with constant 'power plays'. There is no set hierarchy of importance, everyone wants everything to be on the homepage, everyone wants their own colours.
We also suffer from the other end of the spectrum, we're given a standard agency-wide template an told we have to use it. It's one-size fits all design for an agency that encompasses many different things. - blackgt93, on 06/02/2009, -0/+3quark
Don't apologize at all.
Just because a company is a huge lumbering behemoth with lots of red tape doesn't make it ok to have a ***** website.
It's ok to be angry, you're a designer, you ARE right, you ARE an expert. All of this ***** about being arrogant is ridiculous. When was the last time anyone called a programmer who criticized Windows/OSX/Linux a pompous *****? - yongfook, on 06/02/2009, -0/+3Curtis, if you had said "here's a fantasy AA website that looks much cleaner than the one up there now - maybe the AA team can use it for inspiration" and just left it at that, I think everyone would be cool with your design.
Instead though, you wrapped it up into an "I'm the expert"-style post telling them to fire their design team (really??), which irritated me as I've been in the exact situation as the AA guys before. Juggling the amount of requirements that an organism such as the AA online team has is going to take a lot more to be solved than an hour in photoshop and some web 2.0-style gradients. - jsmithers, on 06/02/2009, -1/+4THIS IS *EXACTLY* why Microsoft's products are so terribly, terribly engineered - the design-by-huge-committee process which paralyses all rational design processes and thought. It reached it's logical conclusion in Vista, a product so extremely bad that it reduced PCs that had the power of supercomputers of a few years ago, to the speed and efficiency of a home computer of the early 80's, except machines running Vista were even LESS usable.
Something amazing and good has happened with Windows 7 though, and you can bet it's due to a radical internal restructuring of Microsoft's Windows engineering teams.
Oh, and if you think I'm just trolling? Multiple current and ex Microsoft staffers have attested what I say is true. - Leonffs, on 11/20/2009, -0/+3Those would have to be some pretty stupid Ex Microsoft staffers to suggest that Windows Vista reduces your computer to 80s capabilities. The failure of Vista is a 90% PR failure.
- nyxerebos, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2"just because there is a large number of "'steakholders'" (yes, I quoted your quotes because it should not have been quoted, it was the proper use of the word), doesn't mean that the design can't be changed."
Actually, I have found that to be the case, especially where the person who must ultimately decide in a disagreement between departments doesn't know crap about the web, marketing or customer experience. It can't be changed because there isn't the will to do so in the people who must approve a change. - noahhoward, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2"Um, I dont want my airline homepage to be clean and simple - I want it to *expedite* the tasks I need to do on it every day."
Contradictory statement is contradictory.
A WELL DESIGNED clean and simple homepage attached to a well designed site WILL expedite the tasks its users need to do. - realdcurtis, on 06/03/2009, -1/+3That is a *disadvantage* from a user experience point of view. Looking at that as an advantage is how you make your customers hate you.
- dazparkour, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2Stakeholder is not new.
- redfan, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2"Clean and simple does not imply well designed.
Just that its clean and simple."
True, but a website can be both clean and simple as well as well-designed. The current AA.com website is neither, and that's coming from someone who uses it to book travel and check flight status pretty regularly. - ahoyhere, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2We agree about testing, but there's no way their current design was tested -- thoroughly, or perhaps at all.
Dustin's redesign was a whim. Would it have to undergo revisions? Well, sure. But it's not as if AA is Ugly But Usable. Far from it. It's a usability and clarity nightmare... a posterchild for every "stakeholder" having his pet project which has to be featured.
And those BUTTONS! Dear lord. The page breaks just about every single usability guideline. And those guidelines were really made for high conversions, so your point about efficacy is undermined.
By the way, check out this gem:
http://aa.com/women
Good to know all those thorough design processes you speak of weed out elements that are actively insulting to the customer.
Not to mention burying the entire purpose of the page in a sidebar, under an ad. Sidebar blindness, anyone?
Remember, consensus is always about taking things away... never about adding. Just because that's the environment many designers "have" to work in doesn't justify it, or make it right. It just means that it exists. But it doesn't have to be.
Committees are poison. Iteration and testing are the cure. - nyxerebos, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2It's a matter of doing things well. You might be able to sell tickets, but they might sell more, people might be more inclined to buy them, if their site was clearer, cleaner and easier to use.
- MiNGLED, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2Design IS how it works, not just how it looks. The whole process from arriving at the home page to getting your confirmation for the tickets you've just ordered should be as simple and easy as possible. Yes, there should be options for people who want more choices but there's a difference between showing everything on one page to giving you choices as you go though the process. And it's true that features such as bargain offers and products the airline needs to push are important, people are much more likely to choose them if they are easier to see than just one more element on a cluttered page with dozens of options there already.
- inactive, on 06/02/2009, -1/+3It can be summed up as this
"Opinions are like *****, everyone's got one"
I work as a designer for a medium-sized corporation and even just going through 4-5 upper-level people in committee becomes a burden. It took literally 4-5 months just to get a business card re-design approved.
It's like that scene in Fight Club
"can I get the icon in cornflower blue?"
It is the little pissant details that hold a project up. - MrSkills, on 06/02/2009, -0/+2The other thing that Microsoft got wrong is that they throught "design" was just about how the thing looked - so much of the new eye candy in vista is obtrusive and annoying. Apple (mostly) use the eye-candy for a purpose, giving important cues to the user (showing you where your minimised windows have gone etc.)
- realdcurtis, on 06/03/2009, -0/+2Yongfook,
You're right. I made a huge mistake with the positioning of that letter. It started off as a rant, because I was angry. I had no idea it would gain this much attention. I respect the work people do at big companies, and the politics they have to navigate.
But I do not respect people who consider design like AA.com acceptable for a multibillion dollar customer-facing company. - CircleFusion, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1I worked on the HTML team for GE for a while. We experienced similar issues like this, though not quite as bad as the AA site. There should be some people in any large company that aim to push boundaries. Similar to including fiber in a diet, this is vital for a large company over the long term. GE sorta had a couple people who tried to push boundaries (one of which was my immediate boss) but it really isn't enough, imo.
Like the reply title said... his suggestion is right, so very right. Hopefully, AA changes their site design within the next year, and then we can have a followup. - NoShelterHere, on 06/02/2009, -1/+2Looks like your sarcasm meeter is broken, Mr. Curtis.
- Averness, on 06/02/2009, -2/+3I liked the first one better. The redesigned one looks over simplistic and amateurish. It looks more like a phishing site and would make me check that I didn't typo the URL.
- lincolnparkx, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1Nobody buys directly through AA anyways.
- monica1357, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1Americans! Please don't forget that Ford did not accept bailout money!
- doctordbx, on 06/02/2009, -1/+2Yeah, his preachy articles do scream "DOUCHE!".
- CircleFusion, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1I agree with MiNGLED. Design is about functionality. It's not just about making things look pretty. A lot of people misunderstand that.
Like I said in a reply above, the redesign that he pitched could easily be adjusted to include more features, but perhaps in a more appropriate way. In fact, there are some parts of his design that suggest more features (like the plus icon next to the "To:" field.
The current AA site theory would be the equivalent of taking all of the tool options in Photoshop and making them all display at one time so you could quickly gain access to them. That would result in a very messy and less usable interface. Instead, Adobe decided to make most options reachable only within certain contexts, or reachable after you expand a toolbar that is minimized. Likewise, something similar could be applied to the AA website. More use of icons like "Expand" or "Options" or "More". - CircleFusion, on 06/03/2009, -0/+1They don't need taste.
It's not about "style". It's not like picking out wallpaper.
This critique is about functionality, which is at the heart of design.
I totally understand why AA's site is the way it is. You're certainly not teaching me something new. Just because "that's the way it is" is really no excuse. Honestly, that thinking of "that is the way it is" is the reason why large corporations fail. It's the reason why Google overtook search. It's the reason why US car manufacturers were getting beaten by japanese car companies. If CEO/CFO/CTO of a large corporation is reading this story, they should reconsider how their company's internal structure affects the effectiveness of their products. That's the moral of this story. Businesses should always strive to improve their business. - NerdyDillinger, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1Very interesting read. And some of the commentators bring up some very valid points...
- dsmx, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1Wouldn't be an issue if the government hadn't of bailed them out.
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