Why I Would Be the Best CEO Ever »
I thought this was interesting. I went to the site “Dear American Airlines” and they actually responded to this post about their web page. It is just sad to see amazing designers work for companies but the ladder of co-workers and other authorities destroy their creative outcomes. Please leave the designing up to the designers. We don’t want to see “Jon’s” (“the CFO”) cloud picture from the American Airlines Aircraft on the front page!!!
I spent a couple hours redesigning your front page. This is what I settled on. It’s just a small start. Imagine what you could do with a full, totally competent design team.
Do check out the Dear American Airlines link above. But in short, a designer tried to use the American Airlines website and was so frustrated he decided to do a mockup of a redesign and send it to AA, begging that they change their site. Here’s the old (current version) in black and white, infomercial-style, and the redesign:
That the new one is better is obvious, though I think the redesign is hardly groundbreaking; it’s just that it doesn’t look like it was built in 1998. The more interesting thing, I think, is that it shows how big companies fail, especially when it comes to design or technology (and even more so when it both are involved). I agree with the designer that blaming it on bigness itself is a cop-out. I also agree with 37signals: “Interface First”. Any restaurant owner who thinks a restaurant is only about food, and who ignores the appearance of their space figuring good food will keep ‘em coming, is going to face a tough time staying in business. A company is their interactions - which includes everything from buying a ticket online to sitting in a comfortable seat in the plane. There may be great people doing great things in the back room, but it doesn’t matter if the customers never see the back room.
Though “bigness” alone is a scapegoat, I do recognize that it is harder to have good, consistent company structure if you’ve been around forever and have lots of moving parts that want to continue moving the way they were. So, to a certain extent this is just economies of scale. That term is usually used to refer to something that get’s cheaper as the production increases - cheaper (on a per-car basis) to build 100,000 cars than 10. But what is often overlooked is that the theory of economies of scale is described not by a line that slopes downward, with costs going down as quantity goes up, but rather as a U-shaped curve. There is an equilibrium at the bottom, a reason why big companies aren’t bigger.
(There is often confusion, too, about having several/many competetors being a cause for one company not dominating a market, versus the result. Before anti-trust laws, certain industries became monopolies, like oil and steel. But, for example, it is only in the last few decades that retail has consolidated to an essentially national level. With computers, modern management techniques, and more ways to advertize nationally, it is feasible for Walmart to have stores everywhere and still make sure that I can always find a blender on the shelves when I’m looking to buy one. Try organizing hundreds of stores in 50 states, each of which has many employees and thousands of products that need to be inventoried, bought, shipped, and sold, using ledgers, punch cards, and telephones. The point of this aside is just that the reason Safeway hasn’t bought out Kroger’s and Shaws and all the other regional grocery chains (or, for that matter, the Hyde Park Coop), is not lack of desire to expand, or anti-trust regulations, or that Shaws-customers are so loyal to their brand that they wouldn’t shop there if it were called “Safeway”, or even access to credit; rather, it’s that running more stores is not always cheaper.)
So, yes, big companies are more complex and therefore require more work to coordinate all their different parts. But if the guys (I’m sure they’re mostly guys) at the top really understand their market, they would see that having a cohesive design of the website, and a cohesive company vission that runs from the home page all the way to emptying the toilets, is precisely the way to mitigate the coordination problems of large companies. Walmart, for example, does this well I think, at least for a while. They had a mantra that linked everything together, and it meant that they could act like a small company while also employing over a million people in the US. In other words, don’t say “Oh well we have all these divisions who work on different things and it’s really hard to get them to all work together”, instead make working together the priority and organize the divisions to do that first: the Advanatge program division should first work at improving the interactions AA has with customers and SECOND work at making money with a frequent flier program.
Easier said than done, to be sure. Just look at the FBI and CIA: I think it’s doubtful that either will ever put security, which requires communication and deliberation, above their individual agency’s autonomy and interests.
