Creating Controversy for its own Sake (AA.com redesign fiasco)

I like his website, but his hubris is monstrous. Anyone can crank out a clean design in a few hours when they're working with no specs, business goals, market research, investors or actual customers to answer to. (I liked his AA.com design, but it was one page deep and dumped critical parts of the original's site map.) As for the guy getting canned and the faux 'net outrage, gimme a break. He should've known better. Fortune 500 companies that employ tens of thousands of people aren't known for deviating from policies as basic as you keep your mouth shut about the inner workings of the company in a published public forum.

We're on the cusp of a changing society. Customer experience is becoming, in a very literal way, the brand of a company. And when I come across companies so clueless that they won't spend 50k to hire a design firm to design their online identity/experience, I can't help but wonder what kind of negative effect that has on the evolution of the internet and on customer experience design as an industry.

Fixing AA.com would be [strike]ridiculously[/strike] relatively cheap and simple, especially if it was just a new skin based on the logic they already have built (even though there are serious flaws there as well). Yet the company has not done this. It hasn't even hinted at this, and it fired the one guy who seemed to care about it in the organization. This is a management problem, not a design problem. When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid. But I honestly believe the fault for a failing like this, a failing so visceral that it affects the image of the entire company in the eyes of its customers, rests solely in lap of the CEO.

American Airlines is no doubt a terrible company, and not just from a design perspective. The culture there is broken, the "business" is failing (it loses billions of dollars a year), and the majority of customers hate the experience. Something is wrong. Bringing attention to it, I think, can't possibly be a bad thing.

We've accepted this system. Many people at this site will vote me down for questioning the good of the corporate body over the good of the individual. Many will simply vote me down just because it was in the poor guy's contract. But the bottom line is that American Airlines fires people who try to reasonably speak their mind. Simple as that. And the people who vote down against the good of people in favor of the good of the corporate body are the enemy.

> 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.

> 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.

What irony! The So Serious guy is calling out others on being not courteous and not humble in a discourteous, unhumble guy.

Holding people accountable is respectable. And for that, I respect. I respect you and Dustin. Accountability is a rare bird these days indeed.

But really, Dustin Curtis makes some good points. The reason sites like AA's are so much worse than they could be is precisely because of bloated and poorly-organized infrastructure and competing interests. That excuse isn't going to stop customers from going to better, more easily-navigable sites if they have a choice. I have bought plane tickets more than once from airline B instead of airline A just because I couldn't get what I needed on airline A's site. About a year ago USAirways.com charged me eight times for the same flight and never sent an e-ticket. I don't buy from them any more. If I can't find and buy the best flight from airline A because their web site doesn't work well it's the same result to me as if they don't have that flight.

Look at how much more market value has been created by companies like Kayak.com who have used a lot less resources to create a much more effective buying experience than the most of the big lumbering airlines. Their gain has come about because the airlines have not been able to overcome their organizational problems.

Also, what Mister X* wrote was quite tactful. While it acknowledged some internal problems at AA (which certainly are obvious anyway) it did so in a very graceful way and provide a pretty good counter-argument. It was about the best statement American Airlines could have hoped anyone would have put out in response to Dustin Curtis' piece. You might argue that they were justified in firing him. You might be right (and you might not) but they were also very clearly very stupid to fire him. Had they merely given him a mild rebuke and then promoted him then they could have maintained control over what has turned into a small scandal for AA. Instead, he's no longer bound to watch his words so carefully. I hope he'll have more to say.

So if Dustin Curtis really does chew broken bottles and turn into a werewolf at the time of the full moon* that's too bad. All I know about him is that he seems like a pretty decent designer who has strong opinions and isn't afraid to voice them but who probably hasn't read Frederick Brooks.

Maybe if someone upstairs at AA had an attitude like Dustin Curtis and Mister X I wouldn't be putting them on my list of "companies to avoid doing business with whenever there's a reasonable alternative."

* P.G Wodehouse "Service With a Smile"

* Why does this name make me think of "For British Eyes Only..."

* Another P.G. Wodehouse reference I can't place.

There are many big companies with sites not only ugly, but unusable. For example, Rogers.com (Canada's cell phone almost-monopoly). Half the site (the account management interface) seems not to work with anything except IE6. Are the people responsible for that abomination incompetent? I'd say so. But we are all supposed to be nice to the slow big companies and not talk about it on the Internet :)

Wait... what? None of this makes much sense at all.

"Metrics"? Metrics for what? A metric is just a way of measuring things. What are we measuring? Pixels? Number of visitors? Number of bytes transferred?

"Creative direction"? Again, what does that mean, exactly? It's an airline website. It's supposed to be elegant and functional, not a work of postmodernist art.

"Business acumen"? Business = getting people to pay you, and people will be more inclined to pay you, all other things being equal, if your website is better designed. Is there some reason why a website redesign would cause AA to lose money? The cost of designing a website is trivial, in comparison to AA's annual budget of $22,935,000,000.

"Sales experience"? "Sales" usually means selling things to people in person, or over the phone, which is a very different business from designing a website to sell people things (ask anyone who's done both).

"Actual functionality" is the only legitimate criticism here. It's quite a bit harder to make a website that actually works than to draw it.

"Enterprise scale" is a myth. Justin.TV, according to their website, currently has 29 employees (including the founders). Justin.TV's Alexa rank is #222. American Airlines has 85,500 employees, and their website is less popular (rank #1,465), and almost certainly requires less bandwidth and storage space to boot.

I won't comment on whether the guy is or isn't a jerk, but the ability to spit out a long list of fancy words ("metrics"? Come on) does not a legitimate criticism make.

First, when I was 21 (in 1999), I was the founder of my last startup, Tellme. So I have been a young entrepreneur.

Second, one of Tellme's customers (in 2002) was American Airlines. So I understand how they work and the challenges they face.

At Tellme, we built a lost baggage voice application for AA. They figured if we could make their 800 number keep customers happy when the airline lost your bag, we'd be able to do a decent job on the rest of their apps. I'm proud to say that today Tellme answers every call to American Airlines, but back to lost bags. In the course of building that initial application, I learned things like: airlines issue a ticket number, a PNR, a bag tracking number and a lost bag ID to customers. These numbers are all different and customers don't know which is which. I also learned that at that time, American could not pull up a list of reservations (PNRs) based on your Frequent Flyer number, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary that year. Finally, I learned that passenger names for the lost bags database contained only the first 8 characters of a passenger's last name. Projects were underway with major subcontractors such as Sabre and EDS at that time to resolve and improve some of these issues. But the point is, big companies have complex systems. Some of these things were unbelievably bad at first glance to a tech guy like me, but they were all there for a reason. We also take for granted the fact they manage the incredible operational logistics of taking off a few thousand airplanes and moving millions of people around at 500+ mph in the air every year -- not too shabby! So my takeaway #1 is that it is far too easy for geeks, especially inexperienced geeks, to bash the complexities of big enterprises. At Tellme, we were successful by working within the constraints we had. For the lost bags app, we figured a consumer would never know which bag ID or ticket number we were asking for, so we built an app that found the user's lost bag record by asking the caller for 1) city where bag was reported lost; 2) date of loss and 3) last name of the passenger. Since the last names in the lost bags database contained only the first 8 characters of a user's last name, we used the US Census database of all names to automatically expand all 8-character last names into all the possible last names (e.g. Williams would be expanded to also include Williamson, etc., as a possible match). Throughout our deployment and work with AA, I became really impressed with the talent and dedication of their employees. A woman I worked with closely wore a necklace with a charm she had been awarded for 15 years of loyal service to the company. In 2002 the company was 4 months post-9/11 and to see the people there move full speed ahead on new applications amidst the greatest challenge to their existence in the history of their industry -- not to mention a national tragedy -- was inspiring.

Second, I was a 21-year old entrepreneur once. I was brash, insensitive, and abrasive. I grew up an only child. You do the math. At times I made cynical remarks that were not helpful. I was smart, and I seldom doubted my own opinions. As my mother would say, "Often wrong, but seldom in doubt." One of the folks on our founding team suggested I read Dale Carnegie. Another gave me the Steven Covey book. In the end I became a more effective communicator not just from reading books but by growing a little older. Yes, Dustin's remarks about AA where he paints them as some sort of completely incompetent idiots are wholly inappropriate and abrasive and unfair. I think that's in large part because the guy is 21. I also understand that designers can be an especially opinionated bunch. Of course, this type of vitriol is not limited to youth. For example, folks on one end of the political spectrum or the other often refer to Nancy Pilosi or George Bush with disdain that ignores the humanity of these individuals. Whether due to youth or passion, people lose their perspective, and when we do this, our message gets lost in the heat of its delivery.

My recommendations would be to try to put yourself in the shoes of the guy you're criticizing. You can be frank in your criticism, but you don't need to be callous. It gets easier with age. I'm still to this day critical of some things, and often I am passionate about those opinions, but it's possible to be a passionate critic without coming off as a jerk. It's something I work at all the time.

It's also possible to be an airline and have a good web site. As an American Airlines customer, I hope they improve a lot in that area soon, as Virgin America is definitely setting the bar today for in-air customer experience, and neither has a particularly great Web site. Yet.

It's like an old joke that someone got punished for disclosing military secrets after he said that general is stupid.

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

Let's say for a second that Dustin really is a ridiculously ignorant designer (he's not) - who gives a crap? He's a customer who is really displeased not only with the AA website but with the total experience. And the majority of the comments on the other submissions were about how even people here hated the company, before you found out about the firing of Mr. X.

Ignorant, fine. Harsh, fine. You guys are getting caught up in criticizing Dustin because it's the easiest thing to do. It's weird how all you anti bigco people are so riled up in the way someone expressed their poor customer experience and overlooking the fact that AA fired an employee trying to reach out. I know it violated the contract, whatever, but that just shows us where AA's mind is. Mr. X didn't say anything that made me look down upon AA. We know big companies run slowly, that's a constant. I doubt there's one person out there who read Mr. X's statement and learned something uniquely bad about AA that they didn't know of before. If anything, it made them look more humane.

You're right though, a 21 year old's ignorance is the real issue here. Forget widespread displeasure with AA, or the fact that they fired an employee for personally reaching out to a customer that else wouldn't have been reached out to, it's the arrogance that really kills you.