This reminds me of why I abhor "concept" designs that people photoshop up to look like the next generation iPhone/iPod/Mac/Telsa.
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. None. That expression is an illusion, a way peopel have of rationalizing their inability to make change.
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."
they're still useful. they provide a good exercise for the designer, and although it may not be something that can be implemented/will be implemented they can experiment with ideas and present new patterns or just a particular arrangement of them. design theory work, i suppose, as opposed to designing for implementation.
There are no technical constraints, only bureaucracy constraints.
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.
Great letter by the UX guy, but I feel like Dustin completely missed the point. I know it's tempting to go the 37signals route and turn this isolated example of [what he considers to be] a poor website into a rant on how big businesses just don't get it, have bad taste, hate their customers, etc. The problem is that it's just not true. It might be true for AA, though I'm not convinced, but there are lots of examples out there of big profitable companies with terrible websites that have lots of customers who love them anyway. This whole fiasco feels like another case of a web professional viewing the world from inside their bubble.
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.
Personal anecdote here: I've never had any trouble booking a ticket through AA. Furthermore, the state of the American airline industry is such that nobody flies a "preferred" airline, everyone just flies whatever is cheapest.
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.
I think the point is, it doesn't have to be this way. The fact that it is is due largely to those in charge, that have the power to change things, being willing to leave them as is.
[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"]
Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy companies are teams of talented individuals.
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.
"Another interesting demonstration of the fact that behind a lot of crappy companies are teams of talented individuals."
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 ;).
Great article! John Gruber makes a very similar point in his talk "Auteur Theory of Design" [1]. His thesis is that "the quality of any piece of work always approaches that of the decider (i.e the autuer)".
Seems like a bit of a contrived argument. I think the more plain, more boring, but more realistic explanation is the one given in the letter from X. The reason the website looks like it is is because of the politics involved in building it. When someone has maneuvered the corporate landscape for a year to get a slice of the homepage, you're not going to be able to overrule them just on the fact that "it's bad design".
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.
Did anyone expect anything else? My default assumption's that behind corporate websites are more-or-less talented people stifled by corporate bureaucracy.
In my experience, as a UX person in a small agile company that works with lots of large, not-so-agile corporations, i've seen this story over and over again. It's relatively well documented in the field, but broadly, it's a matter of access. the fact that a UX person that's not the CEO responded to this indicates simply that AA is late to the game. The teams we work with may start out that segmented, but usually getting the right experience together means going to the up the corporation's ladder & using that as means to effect the change across all the departments and divisions that have a stake in the experience being developed. More than once this process has (or should) effect the employment in those divisions because most large corporations weren't structured to create the artifacts they are now held to. Along the way, in a successful (read: not doomed) company, executives emerge that are more conscious of the customer's experience. The evolving question is a matter of response time - how quickly can a company adapt to new environments. For AA, it sounds like it'll take a year or more to see significant change. we'll see if that's fast enough.
At the AA annual shareholder meeting yesterday morning, Mr. Arpey said the company is "taking efforts to improve customer service". I think this is a shortsighted goal. AA should take efforts to improve the whole customer experience.
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?
I'm not so sure I like the airy new iPhone-ified GoogleTwitterGrooveshark style of interface that much better. Maybe AA.com could add that as a front end for simple transaction and have an "Advanced" option to go to the cluttered kind that gives you all the options.
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.
"The reason most large companies have bad design is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator."
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.
Ah, what I meant to say was "The reason big companies with bad design are the way they are is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator."
Something I've been advocating for a while to UX people fresh out of school is that the design bit of their job is really the easiest and least important part of what they do. UX is about process which means it's about navigating politics and procuring buy-in and being able to communicate across a broad range of cultures.
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.
I think his viewpoint is a tad pretentious, and what we’re seeing here is really a company who is afraid to put itself in a new position, be it out of fear or some sort of analytical paralysis that says if it’s new, it might not work. I think good ‘taste’ comes from a willingness to change--rather, an insistence on change for the better leads to what comes across as tasteful.
I think Google is a prime (but rare) example of a large company that has maintained "awesomeness". They encourage creativity, recognize their employees, and focus on providing a good experience to the user. They're not afraid of a big change, so they're able to step back and say, "okay... how should this REALLY work?"
There was a comment floating around a few weeks ago about a designer who worked on gmail, and how tough it was to get things to change in google, as regards design.
Based on my Googler and ex-Googler friends, and people they've met from around the country...
* 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
[+] [-] sanj|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raganwald|17 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] sachmanb|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] potatolicious|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zcrar70|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubicle67|17 years ago|reply
[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"]
[+] [-] dcurtis|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karzeem|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Maciek416|17 years ago|reply
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 ;).
[+] [-] ojbyrne|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abi|17 years ago|reply
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ
[+] [-] swombat|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yan|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdonia|17 years ago|reply
more on this:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise
[+] [-] sethg|17 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] gfodor|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeraholladay|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] madh|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edw519|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dcurtis|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shalmanese|17 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] symptic|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecuesta|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markessien|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|17 years ago|reply
* 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.)
[+] [-] 10ren|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|17 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] unknown|17 years ago|reply
[deleted]