Dustin Curtis is a 22-year-old user interface designer and head of user experience at Frogmetrics. He also travels a fair bit. If you are American Airlines, this might be an unfortunate combination.
Especially when
an open letter is addressed to you that begins in part: "Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of
booking a flight on your website,
AA.com."
This was Curtis' way of explaining why he had gone through the trouble of designing a
mock frontpage for AA and addressed the posting thus: "Dear American Airlines, I redesigned your website's frontpage, and I'd like to get your opinion." Admittedly, the page Curtis spent a couple of
hours creating is a fair bit better than the one American Airlines currently employs. But what possessed him?
"I was prompted to do the redesign when I finished booking my flight on AA.com and
was presented with a broken page that had 15 CSS errors." Curtis tells Online Media Daily.
advertisement
advertisement
He also must have been shocked to hear from someone at the company just hours after he had
advocated for it to "fire your entire design team." And he must have been even more surprised when that person was AA's user experience architect. "When I wrote my letter, I wasn't even sure AA.com
had an official design team, much less a 'UX architect'," Curtis wrote on his blog. The surprises did not stop there. "To my absolute astonishment, the guy is actually pretty good at what he does. He
has a portfolio of some great work."
The UX architect, who asked to remain anonymous in his correspondence, wrote a very lengthy response to Curtis, and at no point did he rebut any of the
charges Curtis had made. In fact, he started his response: "You're right. You're so very right," with a sort of exasperation. The UX architect then detailed the red tape and corporate compromises that
have resulted in AA.com becoming the Frankenstein's monstrosity it is today. "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," he wrote. He further chronicles how his company's Interactive Marketing group,
Publishing group and AAdvantage team all have their own access and input onto the site.
"Simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake," said the source. "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."
Its interesting to note that experience is becoming an
increasingly large part of online branding, and companies overcoming organizational inertia seem well-equipped for this. The problem wasn't with the design team, as Curtis had surmised upon his
unpleasant experience -- it was systemic. But the UX architect knows that that is not an excuse. "It'll happen because it has to, and we know that," he says.
Recent Forrester research projected
that customer experience budgets would hold up (but remain flat) throughout the year. But in a recession, "customer experience professionals should promote improving Web usability as a key tactic for
cutting sales and service costs" wrote Forrester analyst Megan Burns.
One thing the UX architect might have going for him is that Forrester research into customer loyalty showed a relatively low
correlation between the likelihood of customers to switch and positive service in the airline industry -- meaning that even when customers have good experiences, they are not that much more likely not
to use another airline. There are other factors -- price being a major one in casual travel. Counterintuitive to this, perhaps, the same research shows that the single organization in all industries
with the highest correlation between reluctance to switch and customer satisfaction is US Airways.
Curtis's assertion that "we're on the verge of a shift" looks foreboding in this light -- at
least if you are AA, maybe not if you are US Airways, Jet Blue or Virgin America.
