I will make 100 redesigns because I'm sick of startups

counter to the whole "Don't make me think" mantra

The problem is that confusing people forces them to think so you're actually making it harder for them to do what they need done. Honestly I have never seen a site where geolocation was useful. I guess if I were in a location where I didn't know the zip code, or street address, or street name it would be useful if I were looking for, e.g., a good restaurant. But in that situation, I wouldn't be using the internet, I'd just ask someone.

Or, indeed, in a different country with a different native language. I worked for one of those for a while, in a job that involved a fair bit of official web browsing (on-line reference materials for various things). Within days of the shift to routing everything through corporate IT, I wanted to kill whoever invented IP geolocation. It's a great idea that should almost never be used in practice.

I'm sure it still confuses some people, but the more common it becomes, the more everyone gets used to it.

The benefit differs across markets and audience though, so I agree it shouldn't be a rule of thumb for good design. At least not yet.

For example, you and I know that you can geolocate my ISP to Nagoya with an API call that won't take a milisecond. How about, instead, doing some JQuery magic:

"Asking Google for your location..." (2 seconds)

"Searching for apartments around you..." (2 seconds)

"Picking best apartments..." (2 seconds)

$("precalculated-results").show();

So we should never redesign and make a website more functional because old users might not use it?

Rinse, repeat, for every major redesign.

From my experience, getting feedback from a small team in 20 person startup can drastically change the site from the designers original vision.

At the bigs companies there are many different stakeholders who need to be appeased. Some of the changes may seem illogical to the average consumer, but they might be well justified by management. For example trying to keep a few big corporate clients happy by including a large cheesy marketing message on the homepage.

Edit: But I admit, DHL is in desperate need for a redesign. Their website is awful.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell - How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell

The most common model I've seen thus far is the "single-minded-guy-at-the-top" model: Apple, Zappos (any other good examples come to mind?). A relentless voice to keep reminding people "what is our core business?" and ruthlessly cull everything that isn't core, even if it contributes revenue.

I don't usually hear about JetBlue's CEO holding that kind of sway-- they seem to have that culture organically. If I recall, Southwest used to have that kind of CEO, but he's retired, so the question remains of how to maintain that kind of focus.

And the subsequent fallout from an AA employee opening his mouth - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922913

The problem isn't necessarily that big companies have incapable web designers, but rather that the influence of even the most capable is quite limited. It seems to be a fundamental problem with large organizations.

I know it's just a sketch you did for fun, read the disclaimer in the page, but: The Main navigation menu, the tips (ads ?) in the left, and the successive steps however can be optimized. Eg: Enter personal information (Mr. Stewart ... It's not needed when the user (mr Stewart) is logged in.

I haven't worked in that situation before, but what is likely happening is that the managers in these large orgs are 50+, didn't grow up with the internet, and don't fully appreciate things like the importance of awesome design in your front page.

If you've ever worked on a design project inside a big company, you'd know that's simply untrue.

Big companies are not actually streamlined profit machines, they're streamlined ego-perpetuating machines. Which is why you have the 10-committee problem, the 50-stakeholder problem, and "Marketing" owns the sidebar and news area of the site, while Copywriting owns only the front page and About Our Company pages, and Operations and/or the Boss' Secretary owns everything else...

It's inefficient as hell to have 10+ people in a design meeting, for example. Wastes profits by the boatload. Committees do not create profits, they just increase the wastefulness of most meetings.

And so on, so forth -- the good news is, as a consultant, they were wasting my time at $300+ an hour.[1] As long as I was content to sit there and do nothing but count my money in my head, it was a great gig.

I remember one client that paid us quite a lot of money for research and initial redesigns, but in the end, the CEO got talked out of approving our $60k budget. Because Marketing was afraid it would cut into their budget -- which was $300k/mo.

Keep in mind: This particularly company's whole business was delivering a web video experience.

12 mos later, they went from several hundred employees to about 60. Last I heard (months after that), they're down to 20.

What a surprise.

This problem doesn't exist only at startups, though. I've worked with a lot of big name companies you'd recognize, and almost everywhere it's the same.

[1] The great thing about being a consultant to big biz is that your rates don't matter. Occasionally a client will initially balk when you throw out $300, $400, whatever per hour -- but it's usually them 'playing poker' with what they are willing to pay.

The fact of the matter is, when they overstuff meetings (which they all habitually do), they are wasting $1000s per hour of their own employee time.

Its similar with internal IT. Invariably they have to answer to people that have no tech background/knowledge, and those same people will not allow the IT dept to make decisions independently. Large organizations guarantee suboptimal results in this manner.

You see the hubris is even more prevalent in the big corporations.