Archive for Blogs

An American Airlines customer experience

My aviation website pick of the week from Episode 49 of the Airplane Geeks podcast:

My pick is the blog of Dustin Curtis, a user interface designer. Specifically, Article 8 (Dear American Airlines) and Article 9 (Dear Dustin Curtis), which you can find in his blog index. Dustin Curtis wrote to American Airlines:

"I’m a user interface designer. I travel sometimes. Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your website, aa.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to fly your airline again. But before we part ways, I have a couple questions and three suggestions for you."

His 3 suggestions?
  1. Treat this as a serious emergency across your entire company.
  2. Fire your entire design team, if you have one.
  3. Follow the lead of new, young, and innovative airlines like JetBlue and Virgin America. They know how to harness repeat business through excellent customer experience.

Curtis then went ahead and actually created a proposed redesign of the AA site. But then, 

"A user experience architect who works on AA.com sent me a response to my letter. He titled it ' You’re right. You’re so very right. And yet...'”

The response gives some really good insight into the process that large corporations use when creating something so seemingly simple as a web page. It turns out there are some 200 people who together determine just what you see at AA.com!

"The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public."

It all makes for very interesting reading and provides insights into why it is difficult for some companies to be responsive to customer needs at anything faster than glacial speed.

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May 30, 2009 · Filed under Airline, Blogs, Website picks

Tweepitition launched for aviation geeks

Airline branding expert, author of the outstanding Simpliflying blog, and previous Airplane Geeks Podcast guest Shashank Nigam has created an interesting little contest. Winners receive autographed copies of the book on Singapore Airlines, “Flying High in a Competitive Industry: Secrets of the World’s Leading Airline” and there is also an a 4GB Apple iPod shuffle to be had.

There are two ways to enter the drawing: You can follow @simpliflying on Twitter and tweet quotes from articles published on SimpliFlying, or you can subscribe to SimpliFlying updates and leave a comment on an article published from now till May 15, 2009.

Shashank produces interesting content, so it's worth following his activities anyway. Find more contest information at Announcing, SimpliFlying’s first Tweepitition!

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May 3, 2009 · Filed under Airline, Blogs