I’ve got so many other things I should be working on instead of typing this, but after reading Dustin Curtis’ reply to Mr. X’s email, I had to post it.
A little background
In May of this year, Dustin posted an article on his blog called “Dear American Airlines” in which he pretty heavily criticized American Airlines’ website and offered up a redesign. Like many airlines (American ones especially… ahem Delta) AA’s website and customer service has gone down the drain. So I can’t say I was all that surprised to see his post and redesign. While probably not the easiest to hear for those responsible, his criticisms were valid and addressed a problem common not just to American Airlines, but to so many designers and companies that are just… bad.
Surprisingly, the User Experience Architect at American Airlines not only read what Dustin had to say, he actually responded and allowed Dustin to post his email (provided he was referred to as Mr. X rather than his real name).
The response was mostly what I expected… someone with a lot of experience trying to do a decent job and hindered by the size of the organization and the bureaucracy that inevitably comes with it. Too many people involved at all stages in the process and in the end, it’s a huge mess.
While I’ve been in similar situations, I can’t say I think it’s a valid reason for AA’s site to look like it does. Reading Mr. X’s reply, I couldn’t help but feel it was more of a cop-out and an excuse than the explanation and apology I was hoping for.
So, “What makes for good designers, good employees, good engineers, good employees, and good companies?”
There’s a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it’s none of those. It’s taste.
When I first started designing as a hobby, I hated everything I made. I knew it was terrible, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never make it good enough for myself. But I didn’t give up, and after a while something clicked. I started to sort of like my work. But I am still not satisfied; every day I reach higher, trying to grasp the level of awesomeness that I can feel but can’t recreate.
I didn’t realize this was happening until I saw a video of Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, explaining the phenomenon as it relates to writing and production. He points out how that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great things. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think you can abstract taste one level further from the people of a company and apply it to the culture of the company.
The permeation of bad taste and large organizations
In the same way bad designers sometimes never get better because they don’t know what they’re aiming for, some companies have a culture that just promotes bad taste and doesn’t encourage improvement. The ideology permeates the entire organization, lowering the required level of awesomeness expected from each employee. Companies like this just float along, in the background of capitalism, exchanging goods and services for money. And that is it. They suck.
A lot of people blame bad design and bad customer service in big organizations on the fact that they are big organizations. This is what Mr. X did. But that’s a cop-out. The reason large companies with bad design are the way they are is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator. The company ends up making bad products. It ends up treating its customers badly. And if the company is being run by people who don’t have taste, it gets stuck. Eventually, the company’s brand suffers. This is what has happened at American Airlines.
Customer experience is the new brand
I’m not referring to a brand as a logo and a typeface. I’m referring to the new kind of brand, the one is formed by the entire experience of a customer’s interaction. That experience gets branded into his or her memory and leaks into the buzz of modern culture. If you can’t make a good customer experience from start to finish, you’ve failed to generate brand value that will attract customers to come back for repeat business and tell their friends to come back, too. That’s how good customer experience directly affects the bottom line.
It’s not age, skill, talent, education or experience that make for the best designers, companies and brands… it all boils down to taste and it matters. It’s what separates the mediocre from the exceptional. You can have the best designers with the best ideas, but if the decision makers at the top don’t have any taste, mediocrity is to be expected.
