Customer's Site Redesign Exposes the Sad Truth about Corporate Inertia

Dustin Curtis is a UI designer. He was fed up with how hard it was to book travel on American Airlines' AA.com Web site. So last May, instead of complaining, he sent them a better UI design. That led to an interesting interaction with a member of the team involved in the design of the AA.com Web site.

Dustin refers to his correspondent as "Mr. X" and claims that he is, in fact, and excellent UI architect and that his identity will be revealed soon.

 PROPOSED NEW DESIGN:

Here's an excerpt from the response Dustin received from "Mr. X", then a member of the design team at AA.com, who was, by the way, summarily fired as soon as this response became public last Spring:

"The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines.

Let me explain. The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public.

However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

Oh how I wish we were, though! Imagine the cool stuff we could do if we could operate more like 37signals and their Getting Real philosophy! We could turn on a dime. We could just say “no” to new feature requests. We could eliminate “stovepiped” positions. We could cut out a lot of the friction created when so many organizations interact with each other. We could even redesign the AA.com home page without having to slog through endless review and approval cycles with their requisite revisions and re-reviews.

But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like."

Click here to read the full reply as well as Dustin's ruminations about the fact that American Airlines should be taking its ENTIRE customer experience seriously, because, as Dustin Curtis says, "Customer Experience is the New Brand." 

(This was all reported in a great blog post: Why American Airlines doesn’t fly online, and what they should do about it by Paul Smith in his engaging Bitter Wallet blog which focuses on customer experience snafus. I found it via a recent tweet from Liam Green-Hughes @liamgh who is a developer at Open University in the UK.)

Why Visionares are Needed to Keep Companies from Ruining the Customer Experience

Here's my reaction. There IS a problem that is endemic to the way that many large organizations run their Web operations.  I just spent the last two days with my Visionaries--the folks who design and evolve some of the best Web experiences on the planet. Here's one thing that these Visionaries have in common: They rule their Web sites with an iron hand. They set the strategy. They manage their own (very small) teams. They do not tolerate a lot of corporate interventions. Most of them have been leading their companies' Web strategies and influencing their firms' business strategies for 10+ years. They have a "Steve Jobs-like" control over the customer experience their companies offer--both online and in terms of many of the other customer-critical processes that impact their brands, the customer experience they offer, and their firms' bottom lines. From time to time, these folks feel like bailing out of their organizations because they are under-appreciated and/or a new boss is put in charge who doesn't "get it." But generally speaking, their commitment is so strong to their customers, they tend to ride out the waves of corporate inanities, protecting their own teams and their authority. They deliver tremendous value to their businesses! The moral of the story: If you want a great customer experience, you need to empower your Visionary Web leader to control the vision, design and execution of your online strategy. The people who have been empowered to do this over long periods of time -- 10 years or so -- have pulled way ahead of their competition.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Thanks, Richard,
Yes Wells Fargo does do a good job with their Internet strategy and implementation and their cross-channel implementation. I am overdue to write an update for my chapter on them (originally published in Customers.com in 1998). I also wrote about American Airlines in the same book. And, to be fair, I think that AA.com is doing a pretty good job, but I liked the point that Duncan made and the way that a brave employee responded. I will look up your articles about Wells Fargo. Thanks for the tip!
Patty

[Richard Anderson]

I (@Riander) tweeted your post, and while I agree that "visionairies" are needed, I don't believe they have to "rule their Web sites with an iron hand" and "set the strategy." Consider the example of Wells Fargo which employs a highly collaborative process involving all sorts of business personnel; their process is described in various places, including an EPIC 2006 paper by Beers and Whitney within the downloadable pdf of the conference proceedings and a Jan+Feb 2008 interactions magazine article by the SVP of Internet Channel Strategy (The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned at Wells Fargo -- sorry, but a subscription is needed to access the full article in ACM's digital library). I also refer to their work and approach in several blog entries, including Breaking Silos.

[Patty Seybold]

Paula/Rokapchen,

I am sorry to now be on your "clueless" list.
I agree with you on two points:

1. Most companies operate exactly the way the AA.com does, and for good reasons. Internal processes and controls are important.

2. A single Web page design is not the same as a well-thought out and thoroughly tested navigation path.

Here's why I promulgated this story.

1. I think we should be encouraging customer feedback, ideas and suggestions. I like the fact that Dustin took the initiative.

2. I admire people and companies who respond honestly to customers' complaints and suggestions and Mr. X at AA.com did exactly that. He shouldn't have been fired.

3. The heads of Web and Online strategy that I admire the most have managed over the years to do several things right, in my opinion. That's what makes them "Patty's Visionaries." They:

- Have held the same job driving their company's online strategy for, on average, 10 years.

- Are highly respected in their organizations because they deliver real value and drive the company to be more customer-adaptive.

- They have small, nimble teams. Not 100 or 200 people, but usually 6 to 10.

- They get this kind of customer input all the time and they would never fire an employee who erred on the side of honesty and authenticity. In fact, I've seen them risk their jobs to protect the folks who work for them.

[Rotkapchen]

Patty I continue to be amazed at how much 'traction' this story gets when it's a really BAD story, especially from a UX perspective.

1. While the offered design may have some greater visual appeal, it's functional appeal is questionable.

2. For the designer to assume that there was someone who could/should receive his design inside of AA was entirely naive. Not only does AA not do most of their own work internally, the scenario that was described by the employee is indeed fairly common across MANY companies. I've not found one that HASN'T operated this way.

3. Let's look at the data. The current design is fundamentally the same architecture that was done by a company I worked for back in 1999. Even when we won the contract for the redesign, American Airlines had in their posession a report that I swear I must have been the only one who read. Conducted in 1997 and published in 1998, it was an industry report that looked at all the major airline web sites and evaluated them across a number of factors (the report was effectively 150 pages of graphs). But there was one telling page among all of them. The only one attribute across ALL airlines that even in 1997 they all EXCEEDED expectations was in the visual design...and yet, our company won the contract because of the visual design comps that were built out in advance of winning the bid (a VERY costly and not too smart way of doing business).

By my estimation, everyone who is jumping in to support this story is just as clueless as the story itself.

[Tom McKay]

A great David vs. Goliath story with a twist, Patricia. I just re-told this story on my Attract More Customers blog.

Thanks for fighting the good fight!

PS: Thanks for joining my mailing list, too. I'm honored.