Designers should be arbiters of truth - Mr. X of American Airlines | Hacker News Reader

Designers should be arbiters of truth - Mr. X of American Airlines

dustincurtis.com

80 pointswhalesalad45 comments

This post is a bit whimsical for my taste. The author seems to imply that it's the job of a designer to rise above the ordinary requirements of their job and insert some kind of politically-charged influence into their day to day work and their interactions with non-designer co-workers, based on what they feel is good or effective design, even if it does not align with the broader corporate strategy.

As for the gift card anecdote used in the article, it doesn't take a good designer, or even a designer at all to realize that "hiding" a customer's gift card balance, or making it difficult to access, is an underhanded thing to do. I think it has little to do with design and more to do with a company's culture and true relationship with their customers.

The suggestion in the article seems to be that only designers are noble people, which is a bit silly.

Agreed, there's no need for designers to be treated as some sort of cadre of white knights. This is just basic business ethics - you could find similar situations in any job at any company.

  In the end, the gift card idea evaporated as quickly as it
  was conceived, so I didn't need to stand up and object to 
  slimy tactics.

Did anybody else think the ending was anti-climatic? Mr. X was, "standing up for the truth," but he ended up not standing up for anything because the project got canceled.

I felt the exact same way. When I read that part the whole thing just sounded so pretentious.

He doesn't even say why it evaporated. Maybe someone else in the company actually did say something.

Maybe it was cancelled because someone else actually had the guts to explain how it was deceitful.

"Arbiters of truth" ? Smug self-righteousness and self congratulation seem to get a lot of upvotes on Hacker News.

Are you surprised by that? This is a site sponsored by an organization that looks for elite people in order to sponsor them as they start businesses. As a result, a large part of the crowd here consists of people who either think they're elite or who want to learn how to be elite.

Combine that with the fact that computer people have a tendency towards being smug/rude/insecure, and you have an audience that's drawn like a magnet towards anything remotely congratulatory.

If by elite people you mean talented entrepreneurs then you might have something ;-)

Ah yes, vote me down, you're elite people you are.

Good point.

And some degree of overconfidence and maybe hubris is perhaps necessary to start a company and to suffer the slings and arrows of that experience long enough to have a shot at success.

Channel that kind of energy into creating something useful, and you can do a lot of good in the world.

So it comes with the territory. But the self-applause can get a little monotonous when there isn't also interesting new content.

And some degree of overconfidence and maybe hubris is perhaps necessary to start a company and to suffer the slings and arrows of that experience long enough to have a shot at success.

Absolutely. And I'm the worst of the lot. When I work on anything, my ego swells to a level that has to be experienced in person to be believed. So the hubris is a good thing.

As you said, where it goes wrong is when that ego forces itself upon topics that aren't work-related.

So Mister X's implication, in context, is that American Airlines' website is so deviously and incredibly terrible not because they're incompetent, but because they would rather you didn't use it.

Having been a customer of AA before vowing in disgust never to let them take a penny from me ever again, I surmise that the hidden plan here is to make you call their customer-service agents to book or change your ticket, since you can't work out how to do it on the website. At AA, calling them to book means a $35 extra fee on top of your ticket.

So that's it? They have the worst website in the industry just to screw their customers for a lousy $35?

I'd be willing to be Ryanair and Easyjet have the same strategy. They want you to call their premium-rate numbers.

Any savvy traveler knows, the "budget" in budget airlines refers only to their operations, not the final price you pay once all the fees, transfers etc are tacked on.

Nope, they don't want you to call their premium rate numbers. I've booked many EasyJet flights and never had to phone them. With EasyJet you can even swap your flight for an earlier / later one (for an extra fee of course) online. It's completely self service on the web.

Even with premium rate phone numbers, call centres are still expensive.

They hate people calling them. It's a terrible experience. They want you to do everything on their website, and go out of their way to make it difficult to contact them directly. Ryanair is notorious for charging for absolutely everything (Checkin fee? Seriously? Like you can opt out of that.)

If you do online checkin and don't check any bags...

There is still an "online checkin fee", which is lower than the "real life" checkin fee, but it's still there. I maintain you can't opt out of checking in when you fly.

I don't think so: Most premium-rate callcentres still lose money. It's not that easy to make a profit on 50 cts/min, of which half goes to the telco's.

I'm certain for Ryanair and EasyJet, everything they do is calculated to extract maximum value from the customer. Call centers included.

come on, my fiancee booked a flight for EUR 17 round trip recently, including their credit card handling fee (which can be avoided by using visa electron). if that's not budget then i don't know what is. i have booked GBP 20 round trip flights with ryanair or easyjet numerous times, you just have to know how to play their special offers game and be somewhat flexible on dates. often, getting to the airport or parking costs me more than the actual flight. if treating incompetent customers badly enables these prices then so be it.

AA does the same thing. I spent last weekend in London and will spend next weekend in Frankfurt for that reason. And I will get around 35,000 frequent flyer miles out of the deal; enough for a free domestic round trip.

If this means that someone has to pay $35 because they can't follow the directions on the website, I am not going to shed many tears for them.

No, they don't want you to figure out their pricing model. They want to ask you a lot of questions, make you go through a lot of steps, and then present you with a price, making you go through the process again to compare prices. This hinders price shopping, and this is why online price comparison services are so popular.

Why would they intentionally make it difficult to compare prices when travel agents and price comparison sites make it easy? I am pretty sure AA thinks that their website is the easiest way to book AA flights. If you disagree, you can get the same fares elsewhere trivially.

The "search by price and schedule" feature makes it easy to see what options you have on AA if you choose to go that route. Without even clicking anything, you can see the effects of leaving on a different day, choosing a different fare class, or taking a connecting flight versus flying nonstop. This makes it pretty easy to compare. (It is arguable that there are too many options. But this is becuase air travel is expensive by default, and people want cheap. So there are a lot of "discounted" fares around. If you don't want hassle, pick "search by schedule" for the search type, and "economy without restrictions" for the fare type. You will have your ticket in seconds, won't have to pay for checked bags, will have the option of paying $50 to upgrade to first class, and can cancel or change the ticket at any time with no fee. The only downside is that the ticket will cost 10x as much.)

>Why would they intentionally make it difficult to compare prices when travel agents and price comparison sites make it easy?

Most people don't know about these sites. AA makes money for every person who is clueless. And there are many.

So do the banks, credit card companies, non-store-brand food companies, etc., etc. Let's face it; if you're too lazy to hold on to your money, it is going to go away. Not getting in on that action means you are going to be put out of business.

(This is why I'm not a business person. I know what it takes to run a successful business, and I don't want to do it.)

If you call Reservations it's $35. If you call "Web Services", it's free. I think the site says something to this effect.

Mr. X points out how they make money off people who forget, lose, or simply discard their gift cards. They also make extra money off people who are compulsively responsible about their cards. After all, the easiest way to make sure you use the card before it expires and "get your money's worth" is to make a purchase that you are sure will drain the entire card. The less sure you are about the remaining balance, the bigger that purchase will be. The same thing goes for getting all those damn gift cards out of your wallet after your birthday so you don't develop a spinal deformity from storing them under one butt cheek.

> The same thing goes for getting all those damn gift cards out of your wallet after your birthday so you don't develop a spinal deformity from storing them under one butt cheek.

I've been carrying my wallet in my front pocket for years for this exact reason.

(Not really related to the topic, I know.)

Seriously though, I had back pain for quite a while. My doctor asked if I did a lot of sitting. When I said yes, he told me to take things out of my pockets when I would be sitting for a while. This was kind of a pain, so I just started using only the front pockets.

I've always thought it natural to carry my wallet in my front pockets. Any particular reason why most people use the back?

I do so because it would get crowded in the front. I carry a lot of stuff in my pockets: keys, phone, notebook, pencil, and wallet. None of those would work well in my back pocket but the (relatively thin) wallet, and trying to stuff more than two per front pocket is uncomfortable.

This would make a funny storyline for a sitcom.

Diverging further from the topic - it sounds like you need a bag (a man-purse if you will). There is quite a wide selection these days in many styles. Also it's quite practical.

(edit: apologies if you are female, but since you need a place to put stuff I assumed you were not)

I think I've come to accept that my gift cards will expire at some point. I'm not sure I'd be horrifically broken up if I went to use a card after a year, and it was no longer active. In fact, if the card worked, I'm not even sure I'd notice to appreciate the company's noble efforts.

Granted, a great user experience should be so seamless that the customer never even considers it, but I'm sure that there are some great brands out there that allow their gift cards to expire. I doubt their image has struggled enormously. Can anyone name examples or give stories?

I love the spirit of the article, though. Arbiters of the truth, indeed.

Actually -- and this is new in 2009 -- gift cards cannot expire by law in California.

Same thing in germany. Shops can put an expiration date on their cards, but that just means they have to pay a full refund in cash from that day on (they have alredy benefited enough from the interest free credit extended to them by the giver of the card). So good consumer protection laws are not only just, but also beautiful, as they discourage bad web design :-).

Not exactly. Sure, non-expiring giftcards are good (I think they are allowed to expire after five years in Denmark, which makes sense, since that is the amount of time companies are required to keep detailed bookkeeping records), but that won't keep people from forgetting they have them, or just never getting around to use them. And it doesn't mean companies can't make it difficult to check the balance.

I read the whole thing through thinking "this doesn't sound like Dustin." I not sure I understand the custom of guest blog entries.

Why doesn't Mr. X publish this on his own blog? It's a decent article -- why not build up his own blog's reputation? Is he trying to reach a wider audience by pulpit-hopping? I was more inclined to click on the link because I saw the domain name and usually like Dustin's blog entries, so is Dustin leveraging his brand or just diluting it?

Dustin was the cause of Mr. X losing his job, so I have a hunch he feels like he needs to give the man whatever help he can. And the point of the guest post is to leverage Dustin's reader base to build attention to his name. His blog gets barely 1/50 the traffic Dustin does, I'll guarantee it. Now it's probably closer to 1/20. Sounds good to me.

Kind of a simplistic post, but one thing I did like was the pink dot at the end of the first column and the beginning of the second. It gave a really clear indication that you didn't have to scroll past the bottom of the quote to continue reading the text. I'd like to see this convention get used more in the magazine-style blogs where formatting is not quite as predictable.

Thanks. Now I can stop looking for the associated footnote at the bottom of the page. I couldn't figure out what that dot was doing there.

The formatting is very disconnected from how people read things on screens. Needing a pink dot in the first place is symptom of that problem.

This reminded me the iTunes that makes impossible to find an option, which I found by accident, to purchase Standard Definition videos (costs $1.99) vs. High Definition ($2.99).

As a challenge try finding that toggle I am talking about. Try purchasing an episode in Standard Definition of season 13 of south park, for example. You will be surprised to see where it's.

It's on the left. In yellows letters against a black background 'In Standard Definition'. It's not too nefarious. Unlike how they used to hide the iTunes Plus setting (when you could order the higher quality DRM free version or be shown the DRM loaded version).

I'm more puzzled that somebody who ostensibly used to train intelligence analysts, got removed for such an indiscretion. Did he think he wouldn't get caught out, or he simply didn't care? If he didn't care, why the Mr.X bit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com