Let American Airlines figure it out
Posted by Carlos Pero | Filed under redesign
I've got to contribute to this conversation about redesigning the American Airlines Web site. I've worked for a number of corporations in my time, and can see both sides of the argument. But the fact is, Mr. X crossed a line responding to Dustin, and as a result Mr. X was "fired".
(I put "fired" in quotes, because according to one of the comments Mr. X was a contract employee, so it's certainly easier to terminate a contract rather than dismissing an employee.)
Dustin Curtis is a young designer, obviously very talented by the looks of his Web site. I specifically mention young because he simply hasn't had the years of experience in the corporate world to know that things aren't always as easy as they seem. In some ways, that's a good thing, because the world needs fresh perspective and optimistic minds to make the Web a better place. But at the same time, you have to have respect for large organizations that are top-of-mind brands and have a market position to defend, if not grow. Let me expound on this further for a minute.
As Mr. X acknowledged, a fresh design is not a hard thing to mock up. But it is orders of magnitude harder to put it in place. I lived through one at Cars.com (before and after). Here are six reasons off the top of my head, please leave a comment if you can think of others:
- The old design is still meeting a need
- It is uncertain how the metrics will change with the new design (revenue up or down?)
- If you have repeat users, they don't necessarily like radical change
- The mainstream Web user often doesn't know the old design is bad
- If there is going to be less content on the page, you're going to have to convince a stakeholder to give it up
- The effort to redesign and recode the home page has to be worth the time investment, given other competing priorities
It takes real work to overcome those obstacles, and that is often the job of someone like a Web Producer. Someone has to explain the reasons why it is worth it, and what the benefits are, because it is not evident to everyone just looking at Dustin's new design. In some organizations this task is handled by a Product Manager, but they usually only know that they have to do something better or different to change the key performance indicators, but are not sure of what yet. The User Experience specialist often knows what should change, but is less interested in quantifying the ROI or putting their neck on the line if it doesn't deliver like someone in business development would have to.
Back to the American Airlines Web site. Dustin says Mr. X was fired for discussing the design process. I think it makes more sense that he was fired for leaking product plans. Some were innocuous to the layman ("16 column grid-based layouts"), but another was a little more competitive ("increased transparency to fares and sales policies"). For whatever reason, management at American Airlines could not let this deed go unpunished. They attempted to keep it quiet, by threatening Mr. X from talking to Dustin again, but that never lasts long on the Internet.
Is American Airlines as a business destined to fail because of this incident? Of course not. Are people still going to fly American Airlines after reading this? Of course they are, me included, because I simply prefer them over United. Could their Web site be better? Sure it could, but "better" is a vague terms that means different things to different people. It's the job of the people employed at American Airlines to figure that out. It is so easy to get on a soapbox and write a big post critical of a big company. Here's another example with someone writing an open letter to Zappos and a much more delicate but official response that basically says "thanks, but we know what we're doing". It is possible to listen to the community and try to help them as I did here when I worked for Cars.com. But like it or not, the fact is that large organizations have different challenges than small ones. Mr. X certainly wished AA.com could Get Real, but that takes a culture change with strong management, and maybe a fresh design can indeed spearhead it. But it still takes time, a lot of work, and a lot of risk to minimize if there is a market position at stake.