Dustin Curtis vs American Airlines
I was having trouble sleeping last night so I started thinking about this issue. For those of you who don’t know, designer Dustin Curtis posted an article back in May targeting American Airlines and the horrible user experience that their website has. He’s gotten a bit of flak the last few days after posting an update on the issue, stating that a user experience architect that responded to his article was fired from American Airlines within an hour of Dustin posting the response. There has been a lot of negativism from the comments on his site and blog posts being written about this. Whether it’s that Dustin was naive for thinking that a giant corporation can change directions as easily as mocking up a new design or a man was fired, most people are missing the point. American Airlines as a corporation only cares about the bottom line.
The point is that American Airlines is clearly a failing company. They’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. The experience of traveling on one of their flights is terrible. Their website is terrible. These facts are not unrelated.
American Airlines will not spend money to make money. In order to please people, they need to improve their customer experience, which in turn would make them money. They are too worried about cutting costs rather then making their flights worth the price. They are hurting everyone in doing this; Us, the potential customer, by making it a lot harder and more frustrating to not only book a flight but enjoy a flight and also themselves because, well, they are losing money.
If a corporation is going to treat us like that, without respect, I think we have all the right to criticize them, as Dustin did. It is not our fault that American Airlines can’t get their machine to publish a decent and usable website (not for lack of talent, mind you). It’s not our fault that they have built a corporate culture that cares more about the bottom dollar then it does about their own product. It is our fault that we put up with it.