Political animals
Last week, American Airlines pulled its flights from Orbitz in a dispute over fees. That means more passengers will have to use the carrier’s Web site to book travel directly. But American’s Web site has long been controversial — just ask interface designer Dustin Curtis.
There. How’s that for a news hook for an 18-month-old story? In fairness, this blog didn’t exist when Curtis launched his attack on American’s Web site in May of 2009. The lessons from that story, however, are timeless.
Before American launched a new Web site in mid-November, their homepage really hadn’t changed in almost a decade. It showed. The site was cluttered. Dated. Ugly. This is the site Curtis arrived at in 2009, and the site he trashed in a subsequent blog post.
The post was not very specific about the problems with the site — only that American Airlines, and its CEO, Gerard Arpey, ought to be ashamed of it. Instead, Curtis helpfully spent a couple hours redesigning the site himself.
Extraordinary! The problems with AA.com were so easy to fix, one man was able to do it in just two hours!
The story doesn’t end there. A designer at American Airlines, Mr. X, sent a letter to Curtis about the site, and Curtis posted the whole thing online. Shortly thereafter, Mr. X was fired.
But the point of this post isn’t to debate the wisdom of American firing Mr. X, or even of Mr. X sending a letter to a blogger despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement. The point is that Mr. X was right.
Everyone who works within or on behalf of large organizations wishes there were no politics involved. The problem is that when someone asks, “Why can’t we do away with politics?” they usually really mean, “Why can’t everyone just do what I want?” Branding is always a highly politicized process because it is fundamental to a company’s identity. It’s only natural that everyone wants a say.
As designers and other creative professionals, navigating the shoals of politics is part of our job. They’re simply a fact of life we must deal with, and the most successful designers are those who not only have a good aesthetic sense but can also manage the organizational realities of their clients. For an airline, those challenging realities are manifold.
In his letter, Mr. X puts it very well:
…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.
The sad thing about Mr. X’s termination is that I don’t read anything in his letter that is particularly critical of American’s management. It’s simply a fact: American is an immensely complicated organization. It has flights and partnerships and loyalty programs and operational requirements and all of these things must be represented somehow.
Curtis defends Mr. X, claiming he is “being smothered by something as innocuous as ‘corporate culture.'” I think that misses the point of what Mr. X was saying, and it’s incredibly naive. Branding is all about corporate culture. In fact, when companies get in trouble, it’s often because their brands have become too distant from their cultures. Consumers discover the brand is a sham that makes promises the company can’t keep.
Now in this case, the design of the Web site goes beyond branding to user experience. The old site is impossible to defend. Absolutely companies should strive to balance their needs with the needs of their customers (the idea that a Web experience could ever be based entirely on the customer’s needs at the expense of the company’s is also naive, but most sites tip that balance too far the other way.) American had some work to do, and to some extent they’ve done it. Or at least, their new site is better than their old one.
But it took more — a lot more — than one guy spending an afternoon puttering around in Fireworks. Because when you’re dealing with a $20-billion-a-year company, with 624 aircraft and nearly 80,000 employees, that serves occasional leisure travelers and business travelers who fly hundreds of thousands of miles a year, creating a single, simple Web experience just isn’t that easy.
Photo courtesy of American Airlines.