The Travesty of American Airlines

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague, Teddy Sherrill, sent me a blog post by a UI/UX designer who recently had the “horrific displeasure” of booking a flight on American Airlines’ website. He raved (justifiably) about how ashamed the CEO of AA should be to have such a horribly designed website, which is “abusive to customers,” destroys the AA brand, and limits revenue possibilities. He suggested that AA’s contemptible treatment of customers extends far beyond the website and is one of the drivers behind the company’s long, slow decline (or at least a symptom of deeper issues at AA).

He then redesigned the AA homepage. His redesign was a vast improvement upon their current site–it was airy, clean, easy to read and navigate. Soon after the blog was posted, one of AA’s designer’s responded. His response? “You’re right. You’re so very right. And yet…”

The AA designer argued that AA’s UI/UX design team was in fact very competent, and wrote that the blame resides in the suffocating tangled morass of AA’s corporate bureaucracy, which requires every proposed design change to slog through endless review and approval cycles, severely impeding potential progress. He wrote wistfully about the agility of small frictionless organizations. Soon after, American Airlines searched their Exchange database for the response our UX blogger posted, and fired the guy on the spot.

My tangentially related moral of this sad story is that the importance of design is often overlooked by companies of all sizes and ages–from startups, to expansion stage, to large, clunky dinosauric enterprises. More often than not, great companies embrace great UX, to a point where it is core component of the company’s culture and image (Apple is a good example).