Dear American Airlines
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- Autokern
This is interesting:
A pissed off designer redesigns AA frontpage:
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_ame…
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_ame…And then submits his design to the company.
Then he gets a reply from the company's UX architect:
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dus…(via Kona, JasonKristofer and all the other guys on twitter)
- monospaced0
Great find. My favorite statement is "Customer experience is the new brand."
- juhls0
Like the re-design.
- There was no redesign, unfortunately.monospaced
- The mock-up, obviously.juhls
- harlequino0
Yeah that's an interesting read. I kind of felt the response coming though. Basically - you're right on, but you have to understand the nature of the corporate machine here.
It's great peek inside why things are rolled out and work the way they do, and the politics of how many hands are in the pot.
- epikore0
The UX architect responded a lot better than Bill Perkins.
- monospaced0
I'm looking at the current AA site right now. Even if they can't overhaul the entire interface of this enterprise site, they can at least re-skin it.
Their corporate typeface is Helvetica, so they should use that in all places consistently. Their tabs and buttons could be polished to enhance cleanliness and legibility and a set of rough design standards could be sent out for each group contributing to the clutter. Get rid of all the borders and fix up some spacing and it would feel a lot better while not really changing the user interface at all.
- epikore0
More reasons to hate marketing schmucks.
- d_rek0
I think a Structured Bankruptcy is probably the right course of action.
- Meeklo0
not sure if the re-design is a lot better, but this is a great viral/ promo for the designer that decided to re-do the site.
- stem0
Great post Autokern,
Your redesign makes complete sense and it's almost impossible to understand why it doesn't look this way already.
The reply form X was honest and managed to explain the situation without bitchin' (which must have been very difficult).
Sadly though, this kind of thing happens everywhere. Imagine how many great people work at General Motors who have given their opinions effort and expertise over the years, only to have it overruled, adapted or simply ignored...
- epikore0
I hate it when someone say's "It's about making things look pretty"
- It's not* about making things look prettyepikore
- thank god he said "It's about making things usable" insteadmonospaced
- GetRefresh0
Boring. Un-remarkable and just plain crap, on both sides.
- kult0
What the UX responder said was very true. "Front pages" are a dime a dozen, anyone on this forum could whip up a single page in 2 hours that blows away the current one.
There'd be a bit more merit to this if he took the time to systematically redesign key pages to the entire site for worst-case scenarios. Otherwise, anyone can toss up a 1-pager redesign of 99% of the Internet. :/
- flashbender0
It is all well and good to do a theoretical redesign of something, but that design would never make it live.
The To and When boxes where you can "type anything in here, a day, a date a climate ..." would never be technically feasible. A climate? really?
Also anyone who has dealt with corporate marketing types knows that the first question asked will be "Can we get rid of that big picture of a palm tree and add some promotional links or something in there?
Why are Online checking and Flight status on there twice at almost the same weight?
That being said I like the redesign and this is not so much a knock on the redesign but on the narrow mindedness of corporate marketing departments and lazy IT departments.
- OSFA0
well played Mr X.
- psenso0
that guy is a dick
he contradicts himselfthe UX guy is right
and the redesign guy calls him a cop out while agreeing with his points..get over youself dick
also - you try running a website like nokia.com - where the company is so monumentally huge that pretty much every page is a department in its own right and they all have their own agendas and promos and whatnot
things like this ARE run from a top level - its not the UX team's fault - its some dickcheese marketing director and resource manager that gives each deparment a budget to chage their own little corner of the site - instead of getting a big build team to do the whole thing. and a digital marketing agency to run the content side.
don't beat on the little man douche bag
- somebody missed the point...monospaced
- yeah probablypsenso
- what was the point?
i just like to run hot headedly at things and see what happenspsenso
- gung_hoek0
the curtis dude, as a designer, he should know better. you don´t call out work or people out like that, not if you´re in the same trade. i guess he did it because he´s a complete noob (23?) and has to taste the snafu that the inner working of the big corp. is. or maybe he´s a dick.
and i´m surprised that he got a solid reply, even more surprised that he got permission to publish the reply. ux guy is absolutely right, but i´d still expect loyalty if i was his AA / 3rd party superior.
- Etype0
Mr. X does not understand how long it takes to develop a brand culture... a few hours really?
- Etype0
The UX guy has his points about company politics and what happens to branding in inhouse usually... but these are what we call badly managed brands