Airline Post

We now know that blogging has become a very popular practice among people of all ages everywhere. Companies regularly search and follow up blogs that interest them. A lot of mysteries are sometimes solved or emphasized by bloggers, who are nevertheless the voice of the people.

This is the case of Dustin Curtis, an User Experience (UX) designer who happens to be traveling very often. He recently tried to book a flight at AA.com, the American Airlines website. Unfortunately he seemed very bothered by the company’s approach and layout and vowed never to request for their services ever again. Before doing so he wrote a blog post, that began with Dear American Airlines proposing a different and a more customer-friendly design for the company’s website.

To his surprise, Curtis soon received a reply from an UX architect, representing aa.com, further addressed as Mr. X. The AA employee tried to explain why in large organizations things move rather slowly and that there are regulations to obey by.

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.

However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

One rule that Mr. X seemed to have forgotten is never to reveal job related information outside the workspace, thus violating a non-disclosure agreement. Some might say that X actually defended the work process of corporations as opposed to smaller shops, but by presenting how the process works and detailing how the update of the aa.com website cannot be done over night, he exposed a lot of confidential data to any third party like Dustin Curtis and after publishing, to the general public.

As he ends his letter in fear he might get fired, we wonder if this wasn’t his actual wish. Last week, Curtis announced that the employee was promptly fired after AA searched its Exchange database for the text of the anonymized email he had published and identified the employee who wrote it.

For it may be clear to some why Mr.X got fired, we should also highlight that more diplomatic measures are preferred, especially in the case of big companies like American Airlines. By shutting out from the public like this, there is always a risk of damaging the company’s connection with the people they serve. And if a company’s employees are firewalled off from the public, the company will eventually lose sight of what the public wants.

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