Test Dan's design. Build it, run a simple A/B test and report back on the succcess.

@Jon Cockle: You're right about Dustin's post starting a conversation over at American Airlines. Mr. X was fired shortly after Dustin's second post went live.

Guess that's gotta mean something, no?

I am sorry, using a shotgun effect with all that info coming at you DOES NOT INCREASE SALES! It is the : clear, intuitive, transparent manner of disseminating information at various points along the use process that garners success.

In fact, this is not web design AT All! It is web Engineering!
All the guts, mechanisms etc. sitting in a chaotic mess. How is someone supposed to even understand what they need to find?

AAAHHH now I understand... One must learn the 'AA site language' to successfully become part of the AA club...;)

But hey, I am just a simple Industrial Designer ... what do I know about the end user :)

BRian

Why are any of us surprised that a commercial airline stinks at making the customer comfortable and the service direct and easy? Bloat, whatever, AA lost the magic decades ago. GM did too and, well, see?
Design (function and style), quality, engineering, and easy customer service all matter!

I simply will not use the AA website because it is so user unfriendly. If I am to book with AA I do it through Expedia or another travel site. The site is too cluttered and slow running. I too have worked for a large company in the Marketing department where it was near impossible to get anything done but I suggest that AA start working on approvals now to get something better up and working.

I think it's time AA.com listened to someone outside their company and stopped using their bureaucratic fat as an excuse for muddling conversions and a better user experience. I think it's time for a change at AA.com considering their stocks haven't been doing so well compared to their competitors year to date: http://i43.tinypic.com/30huez7.jpg

@Jon Cockle- Yes, we don't know AA's conversion metrics but we do know their stocks are plummeting compared to other airlines. You talk about making decisions based on data? Well, maybe that's enough data for them to realize that their current website isn't producing the ROI they want.

F Seidl has touched on the fundamental truth and the hot button to this debate. The website design is just another indication of American Airlines and it's attitude towards it's customers and employees. American Airlines has become so large that they no longer try. American Airlines once the cream of the crop no longer go above and beyond to meet customer expectations. There are layers and layers of management and departments with departments heads and co heads and no one know what their right hand is doing. It take days to make a 2 minute decision. Nepotism is at an all time high. Management giving contracts to girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, sisters, brothers, children and Exs. When so much is going on and so much to be covered who has time to worry about the poor customer.a

I agree that the current AA site is not a pretty one. Without knowing the metrics of how the AA site is actually performing, it's really not fair to throw stones at it either. If it works for them, why fix it? Bottom line is revenue.

I agree with @Jon Cockle's comments. I am currently a UX Designer for a large resort/casino in Las Vegas and prior to this position, I was manager of web development for a commercial airline (allegiantair.com)and consider myself to pretty knowledgeable on this topic. At the airline, I didn't always agree with upper management's ideas on site design and yet, 87% of their revenue is web driven and for 2008, this airline showed profit for all 4 quarters. Not an easy task for a low cost carrier today. Bottom line, the site works for the company and generates big $$. Just as AA's site may work for them as well.

Jim Machajewski-Did Mr. X really get fired for this?

Jon,

I agree with you completely.

A designers job is to listen to the needs of the client. The difficult part of being a designer is really learning and understanding their business. Dustin has pretty much skipped what is the most important part of the design process.
I have followed this story from the get go. I thought Mr. X made a much stronger case. It was clear Dustin has not worked in a corporate environment. You do not need to be a designer to know the corporate world is often redundant.
American airlines knows that they will never lose a customer by the design of their website.

American airlines stock plummeting has nothing to do with the website. Airlines as a whole are struggling. Gas prices going up at the moment doesn't help.

American airlines stock plummeting has nothing to do with the website. Airlines as a whole are struggling. Gas prices going up at the moment doesn't help.

I agree that AA's design is difficult to navigate. It tries to serve all but the end result it serves none. I see this in management whether corporate or public, it is akin to having fiefdoms vying for control of information and legitimacy. What I experienced is that you see a mess that is hard to see or lacks in coherence. Coherence is about respecting customers as Curtis points out. Customers I think are smart to recognize that when the company's main point is to maximize revenue then they will seek other alternative airlines that actually serve its customers.

This relates to what I believe a fundamental design flaw in AA, which is not understanding its customers or end-users. I don't believe that most Americans like me see the colors and Americanism to be very appealing. It actually is passe. I think AA can learn a lot from global airlines like Singapore, Qatar, and Cathay who recognize the fact that we all have become global. Thinking global is in and yet AA continue its fundamental path in culture that spills into their design of hunkering with a concept that has decreased in relevance and uncompetitive in today's global market.

I believe eventually web based tool to generate revenue will catch up to its customers who seek a more global flare rather than outdated ideas about how great we were once. We're great now, how do we become relevant? AA's design is sorely lacking in relevance.

The designer's solution was obviously a bit over-simplified. While it is much nicer eye candy, it really isn't a solution to merely delete what you don't want there, ha. I've dealt with many an airline website over the years as a consumer and I must say that I really dig jetBlue Airways' site at www.jetblue.com Clean design, but with all the pertinent information intact within a much more organized hierarchy. And it's aesthetically pleasing to boot. Although it can be difficult within a large corporation, a good compromise is always the more valuable solution.

Dustin is absolutely right. What's wrong with American Airlines is what is wrong with just about every failing American company - NO VISION. Apple succeeds because it is driven by individuals who make decisions and live by them, not by what their customers think they want. It's the way business used to be run in this great land of ours but then people with degrees in procrastination sold us something called market research. Design is about problem solving from the gut and the fact that Dustin took the time, unpaid mind you, to fix that AA means there is a huge problem with AA.com. Is Dustin's design the solution? No, probably not, but what he did in an hour is a huge improvement. F*&% metrics, F*&% testing, F*&% shareholders departments trying to bow to the whim of every customer. The customer rarely understand what they really need and will often get distracted by what they want. What you are seeing is Dustin's perception of what his AA.com might look like to be useful for him and I happen to think it's what 80% of their users would respond opt in for. Ultimately American Airlines has a huge hurdle to overcome, to become truly forward thinking. It's one thing to follow the follower to become more green, it's another to actually innovate. The only way to do that is shed the committees and get back to strong central leadership who boldly decide what it is they think is important… or as Henry Ford said "If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse"

I completely agree with the indictment of the AA web site. But I agree more with the indictment of the redesign. If you ignore all the actual requirements, it's much easier to do a nice design.

Despite the discussion about the experience being important, the redesign is all about visual aesthetics. Sure, it's a lot more attractive, but what about functionality? How much has been left out? How much has been moved to another page? How much has been made harder to find? or use?

Yeah, I know it's only two hours worth of work. I've done the equivalent myself, but when I only have an hour or two, I think about feel, not look.

And what's the real problem with a site like AA.com? What is the biggest experience problem? Is it the home page? Of course not. It's all the stuff behind it. Like actually making a reservation and picking flights. Like printing off boarding passes. Like checking flight status. In other words, it's all the details that a redesign like this glosses over. AA and all the other airlines could do much better in all of these areas and it would make far more of a difference than a home page redesign.

I'll give two examples:

1) When you search for flights, you get an absolutely abysmal results page. The unreadability and uselessness of the results is astounding. But, more astounding to me is that the AA results, while less attractive than those on Northwest's site (the airline I usually fly), they're more usable. All of the airlines and even sites like Expedia just stink at this.

2) Going back one step, when you do the search in the first place, how about a well designed form? Why is it that they all have the worst date pickers invented? The awful date picker on nwa.com actually cost me hundreds of dollars when a bug in the way they handle the use of both tabs and mouseclicks caused my wife to schedule a trip lasting a week and a month instead of just a week (the fact that February was four Sun-Sat weeks this year contributed, but the bigger factor was the UI auto-advancing to the next month in a particular situation). By the time we noticed, it was too late. When I called Northwest to complain, they said that their site didn't have any bugs. Yeah, right. And, no a simplistic form as in the redesign doesn't cut it.

In summary, it's not that the redesign is bad. It's just that it doesn't address the real problems. It's superficial.

--
Roy Leban
http://www.thisuser.com
http://www.puzzazz.com

http://blog.lab49.com/archives/1335

Visual clutter is a huge problem in GUI design, in which the architect needs to balance the desire to have all information immediately available to the the user, with the need to enable the user to make sense of that information. The aesthetic of minimalism often falls victim as the designer acquiesces to the many competing demands of a project, resulting what I call the “Las Vegas School of Design” - a myriad of colours, shapes and sounds, rendering the user completely insensate.

Ruth Rosenholtz proposes several measures of Visual Clutter, the most practical of which is to compress the image in question using something like JPEG2000 to compress an image of the homepage - the smaller the resulting file, the less clutter.

A colleague of mine once proposed disinvesting in companies based on the clutter found on their home page - an unfocused company would tend to have a homepage beholden to too many competing interests within the company, resulting in a homepage populated with too many grabs for the users attention. Would be an interesting excersise to track measures of homepage visual clutter versus stock price.

i fly a lot of airlines including american, and their site does remind me of how caked-up and disgusting their planes are. "clean" both as design aesthetic and cabin hygiene are not concepts familiar to them. i have more or less read every comment, and the ones that strike me the most is by designer/programmer jon cockle. why on earth are you so offended by this? my money is on dustin having the huevos to kick up a shitstorm. designers (corp ones especially) tend toward the mean more often than not. who cares if his "pretty" design doesn't solve all of american's internal dysfunction? all "users" want is a clean website to book tix. and all "customers" want is to get from point A to point B for the least amount of hassle and money. i, for one, appreciate CLEAN as both a user experience as well as a flyer experience. fake it, outsource it, whatever - american is going the way of GM. yes to jetblue, yes to virgin. yes to the 21st century.

ditto to Gong's comments. and @Victor, forget Dustin's lack of experience, I see his comments more as that of a user (remember those?) who took it upon himself to design out what what would be appealing to him.

I'm pretty sure Dustin would be accommodating to the client's "requirements" upon review. Of course he doesn't know all the hurdles and obstacles that the internal guys have. But do the ordinary users of AA? Do they care?

My vote is empathy for the users, you can keep yours for the client's processes.

Most of the negative comments are the designer has no information to base his design. I can't argue with that but he has picked up on the real reason AA.com exists... To Sell Tickets! All other activities are ancillary.

I have to admit Curtis's intention is quite notable of doing something that up to this point I've never seen like making a big company to wonder whether their website design is accomplishing what they expected. Though I'm not sure if he's right since those kind of companies have a final aim of selling, for instance I have to say this website accomplish both purposes of design and selling intention.

http://www.tradeviewforex.com/

I agree with the author. Thanks to the author for bringing this before our site. Wish to know more about this matter through him.
Matt, from Softlaser .ORG

As a former Orbitz information architect and someone who's worked with both AA and UA, there's a few things at work here.

First off, one of the biggest things that drives revenue for these companies are ticket prices. Even though Orbitz has a better user experience, we'd always encounter people who would book at another carrier to avoid a fee or find a lower price.

Dustin is right about finding excuses. It's all you can do when you are a staff designer working within an organization that does not empower design. The problem at most companies is that they blur the line between stakeholders and designers.

Stakeholders are just that: people with something at stake in the outcome of the project or product. At some companies they are empowered to dictate the design solution intended to accomplish that outcome. That is misguided and guarantees mediocrity.

As someone else said, A/B test them and let the data drive design decisions, there by empowering the designers to prove their solutions.

Ive started doing some gonzo marketing similiar to what Dustin Curtis did. You would be shocked at how much response you get by doing to something for free to show a prospective customer what you can do ( specifically relating to them ). Several hotels in Cool Springs
TN responded positively when I did a website mock up for them of THEIR site rather than go in and show them examples of other sites we have done.

I understand both sides of the story...I did a UI design for a company called Farecast that was similar to the Curtis design. Cleaner, relational, with predictive modeling thrown in. Microsoft paid $40M for them and bookings are very healthy. See www.farecast.com or now www.bing.com/travel

When AA gets in the way of the basic tasks users want to do a company's web site isn't furthering the airline. Booking will continue to go to Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia. Alaska, United, Jet Blue and others have been greatly improving their booking rates with better site flow. Does this mean that AA is going the wrong direction? Maybe the best discount/crazy bargains look is fueling bookings.

My point is it all really needs to be tested, whether it is through gauging bookings through mirror sites or focus groups. If it is like the travel sites they will make more margin on booking a hotel than a flight on their own airline. The bottom line is complicated.

if that is your take where does the customer fit in? the current website is the public solution to all the departments at AA that support the website. the failure is that it does nothing for the customer.
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Word travels quickly and customer experience is everything in an industry already plagued with a questionable record. Flying used to be regarded as a privilege. Not anymore. If an airline doesn't respond, the customer will migrate to another.
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Tim Berners-Lee published what is considered to be the first website in August 1991.Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication (which had been carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer buy phentermine, such as interactive CD-ROM design). Websites are written in a markup language called HTML, and early versions of HTML were very basic, only giving a website's basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different from existing forms of communication - users could easily navigate to other pages by following hyperlinks from page to page.As the Web and web design progressed, the markup language changed to become more complex and flexible domain registration, giving the ability to add objects like images and tables to a page. Features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layout is commonly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like W3C further changed and enhanced the way the Web is made. As times change viagra, websites are changing the code on the inside and visual design on the outside with ever-evolving programs and utilities.Content evaluation and organization requires that the purpose of the website be clearly defined. Collecting a list of the necessary content then organizing it according to the audience's needs is a key step in website planning. In the process of gathering the content being offered, any items that do not support the defined purpose or accomplish target audience objectives should be removed. It is a good idea to test the content and purpose on a focus group and compare the offerings to the audience needs. The next step is to organize the basic information structure by categorizing airline tickets the content and organizing it according to user needs. Each category should be named with a concise and descriptive title that will become a link on the website. Planning for the site's content ensures that the wants or needs of the target audience and the purpose of the site will be fulfilled.

For a Airline company with a rich history like American Airlines the website design need to encompass both what the airline company stands for and also being a user friendly website so when people visit the website they find it something that they can use and get around easily. Stuffing the website with the airline companies data is no good. Instead frequent fliers and visitors should feel good about the website and be able to use the services more easily.

They seriously need a corporate website design one that's user friendly too.

Kelly.