UI Designer’s Head Explodes over AmericanAirlines Website!

Dustin Curtis, a UI designer, was so fed up with the aa.com website that he spent a few hours redesigning it and sending them the design for free along with a letter with a few suggestions.  He hits them pretty hard, “Treat this as a serious emergency across your entire company. Your shortfalls in customer experience do not stop at the website. Your company is losing money every day because customers hate the way  you treat them.”

But this customer rant didn’t end there, it actual got interesting - at least to those business geeks among us who value customer focus and the role of the customer in the enterprise.  A UX (User Experience) Architect who works on aa.com wrote a startlingly honest letter back to Dustin about why aa.com is the way it is.

Dustin uses the letter and aa.com to bring to fore the differentiated roles of ‘customer  experience’ vs. ‘customer service’ in the enterprise.  It’s just a great set of insight into how the basic business values that make a company great - like focus on customer experience - eventually get lost in the organization, processes, and people that manage the enterprise.