A Better American?
Earlier today Dustin Curtis posted a redesign exercise of American Airlines’ website. Like Dustin I’m not exactly a fan of American’s experience. But since I live in Dallas/Fort Worth and fly a good bit, I use the site a lot. I was definitely curious to see Dustin’s work.
While the hypothetical redesign is certainly balanced, clean, and easy on the eyes, the liberty is taken in his post to publicly throw AA’s design team under the bus, eroding much of his argument.
While I’m certainly not the authority on this, AA.com is built with software created by Sabre, an American Airlines-incubated company. Sabre provides reservations and booking software to pretty much the entire airline industry worldwide. Some of this code is likely as old as the Grand Canyon. As such, design changes on a site as large, complex and technologically-dated as AA.com are a whole lot more difficult than designing a single homepage, posting a PNG and writing a rant.
Suggesting that simply replacing AA’s designers with a “totally competent team” will solve the problem is bogus. Doug Bowman is likely the most competent designer I know, and he wasn’t given the wings he needed to fly at Google. Should we blame Doug for Google’s design faults?
For what its worth, AA.com did in-fact update their rewards reservation system last week. Unless you’ve booked a ticket using miles in the last few days, you’ve not seen this. It’s by no means perfect, but its a step in the right direction. If the design team at AA can continue to thoughtfully implement change like this, the site will improve over time. Steering a ship this large takes an enormous amount of patience. It’s certainly patience that I do not possess.
Finally, American Airlines services a ton of everyday people. Not web savvy people, but people like my mom and dad. They get used to the way a site works, warts and all. Moving the cheese for folks like that can be a tricky chore resulting in more harm than good. That’s why AA is smart to implement small changes bit by bit.
Redesign efforts like Dustin’s help bring awareness to how an experience can be improved. 37signals made these exercises famous with projects like 37BetterFedex that showed point-by-point how they would improve the experience. They made their point, detailed their improvements, and left emotion at the door.
I’d love to see more of Dustin’s work, but I’d prefer it not come at someone else’s unwarranted expense. That’s all.
