Response to Dustin Curtis from AA UX person
dustincurtis.com
dustincurtis.com
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.
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."
"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."
Maybe this was a good decision optimizing for something you aren't aware of.
"Other companies like ING and Apple get it."
Perhaps some would think they make poor decisions too.
Decisions optimize for things based on a perspective. If you share the perspective, it's a good decision, if you have a different one, perhaps it is a poor one.
Do you really think UX people at Apple or ING don't have to go through this as well? They might not have quite as many people impacting the process, but there are still hurdles they have to jump through.
Working for a large corporation is a challenge. You do the best you can to effect change, but most of the time you have to settle for small victories and pick your next battle. It sucks, but that's what you do.
So what would you call the requirement that my product parse iCal (RFC2445) instead of ignoring it and simply using the much more rationale Google Calendar GData API?
I could ignore iCal. It'd marginalize me to less than 5% of the market. You could argue it's a decision and you'd be right. But it is a decision that constrains the success of my business. Hence "business constraint".
What am I missing?
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.
Everybody in that company is standing around in a giant circle jerk telling everybody else in that company how hard it is to get anything done. Meanwhile, the company is going down in flames, and the web site is one aspect of it.
"Woe is me, my boss won't let me do good work! It's so COMPLICATED! You can't underSTAND BUSINESS! There are MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDERS!"
People, life is too short to make crap. If you have a job like that, quit.
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.
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.
They're also some of the few profitable US domestic airlines as far as I know.
EDIT: at the scale of a site like AA.com or any global company?
But it doesn't really matter if the company is big or small, does it? The end result still has to be of some level of quality regardless of the requirements. If something is wrong, there's either a problem on the business side (too many requirements/unfocused goals) or on the design side (bad designers).
lol
Try to look at it from another perspective. Getting lots of quality work done quickly? Yes, horror. But there are lots of things you encounter in these large organizations you simply don't see elsewhere. In terms of requirements, logistical issues, volumes, people, politics, etc. Once you push the envelope of your personal experience by dealing with these things, you become much better at everything, including lots of stuff you do for small companies.
Think of it as practicing basketball with a smaller hoop. I have always oscillated between large and small companies, trying to assimilate the best of both. The battle scars from the horror will probably come in handy later.
If you want your suggestions to be taken seriously, you need to provide them in a way that addresses those problems instead of simply demanding better results.*
* I'm assuming you were writing primarily as a design critic, not as a frustrated consumer -- although I understand that the latter motivated the former.
Why? Because it's too hard? Does the difficulty of organizing that many people and interests cancel out the need for a better user experience? Is the market going to forgive AA because it knows that it's just really hard to get things done at AA?
"The reason I ask is not because I disagree with your demands for higher quality." (emphasis mine)
With respect for your suggestion and with passion for my opinion, it isn't Dustin's job to organize that many people and interests, it's management's job. If they run a company that functions like warring city-states, there's little anybody else can do. If they have united all the teams to work together on a single goal, that's a different story.
Perhaps it is impossible to change the structure of these organizations, but I think there is going to be fundamental disconnect between designers and the organizations they serve until one group at least learns to speak the other's language and address the problems they face.
At the very minimum, it sounds like there is an opportunity to weed out inefficiency (somehow) and find newer, better ways to organize people and their interests.
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.
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... .
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.
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.
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.
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.
Close, but I think the problem comes from the top. Only management has the power to crush corporate turf wars, which are almost certainly the cause of teams that don't really work together. The only way this would honestly change is if you had a push from the top, and I'm willing to bet the senior management at AA never uses the website. (Why would they?) To them, it's just another division of sales.
If the CEO had to book all his flights himself on the website, you can bet there would be some improvements, because he would force people to fix things. Without that weight from above, teams can get away with not working together. Witness Apple's website. Their senior management (notably that one guy), definitely cares about the look and feel of _every_ aspect of the business, including the website, which I'm sure he looks at personally from time to time.
I can't imagine what would have happend if I'd replied Sorry, no can do your suggestion because group A and group B both need to be appeased as part of this project.
I mean, most online retailers contract out their shipping.
Of course, they have it much easier in that they have a fanatical obsession with simplifying their product and service line rather than complificating it beyond human understanding.
I'm thinking it is not a coïncidence that a company with a usuable self-service web site happens to be a company with simple, easy-to-understand products and pricing.
Hard for me to say anything about AA's management, I am no expert. But looking at their web site, I would rather own the other company's stock.
No matter what business you're in, you're in the business of customer service
I think that having a well designed website would go under that category. And whether Dustin's design is great or not is irrelevant; the fact is that their current website can be vastly improved.
[Please read no further if comparisons with Apple annoy you :) ]
This is the public face of AA, and it's crap. No one disputes that, and yet it's still the same. Could you imagine Steve Jobs as CEO of AA seeing this site and taking the excuses given? Can you see him taking "We're fixing it over the next 18 months" as an answer?
[Edit: I think I'll market a new bracelet "WWSJD"]
Here is Apple.com a couple of months after Jobs returned: http://web.archive.org/web/19970404064352/http://www.apple.c...
There was an iterative change about 8 months into Jobs' return. http://web.archive.org/web/19971013114837/http://www4.apple....
Then things really started to get better about month 15: http://web.archive.org/web/19980509035420/http://www.apple.c...
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.
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 ;).
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? :)
BTW I don't think you're being naive at all, I think these are very good questions to ask.
There are not enough interesting mid-scale jobs out there to support all those talented designers/coders/etc to all do great/interesting things.
Or, as some people would put it, "90% of everything is crap".
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
* Google disrespects designers
* Google disrespects founders of acquired products/services
* High-ups who hold meetings don't even recognize their lower-level managers who they have tasked with pulling unicorns out of their (lower-level manager) butts -- even after they've succeeded
A friend of mine was a web manager who launched 2 or 3 MAJOR projects that got tons of press, in tons of languages, without nearly enough resources - and a certain Google Diva actually asked to have her removed from a relevant meeting to "cut down on guests"
I can't wait for the Google hero worship to cease.
(PS their NYC office is like a lab rat maze. Shiny colors, sad aura of compressed food pellets and crushed spirits.)
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