Creating Controversy for its own Sake (AA.com redesign fiasco)
I agree with a lot of the points in this article. Yes, my original letter to AA was, admittedly, a bit vitriolic. But I don't apologize for that, nor do I regret it. I'm a designer and an entrepreneur. I'm passionate about great user experiences. I think fighting for great user experiences from companies is a good thing. What is passion if you don't fight for what you love?We're on the cusp of a changing society. Customer experience is becoming, in a very literal way, the brand of a company. And when I come across companies so clueless that they won't spend 50k to hire a design firm to design their online identity/experience, I can't help but wonder what kind of negative effect that has on the evolution of the internet and on customer experience design as an industry.Fixing AA.com would be [strike]ridiculously[/strike] relatively cheap and simple, especially if it was just a new skin based on the logic they already have built (even though there are serious flaws there as well). Yet the company has not done this. It hasn't even hinted at this, and it fired the one guy who seemed to care about it in the organization. This is a management problem, not a design problem. When I mention this, and when I call out the CEO specifically, people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid. But I honestly believe the fault for a failing like this, a failing so visceral that it affects the image of the entire company in the eyes of its customers, rests solely in lap of the CEO.American Airlines is no doubt a terrible company, and not just from a design perspective. The culture there is broken, the "business" is failing (it loses billions of dollars a year), and the majority of customers hate the experience. Something is wrong. Bringing attention to it, I think, can't possibly be a bad thing.