Dear American Airlines and Dear Dustin Curtis

[John Wang]

Just curious about people's thought on these. Just got around to reading them myself, albeit a bit late. But I noticed that I couldn't find any links to comments attached to them. I'll have to do a bit more digging around to see if I can find anything.

Part 1: Dear American Airlines
Part 2: Dear Dustin Curtis

It's basically about a complaint about website/design usability of American Airlines site and the response from one of the members of the AA.com UX team.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around it and figure out what my thoughts on it are.

[J. David Beutel]

Very interesting. Dustin places too much importance on aa.com, however, because most people book on sites that compare all airlines, like Orbitz, Travelocity, or even travel agents. AA also developed the Sabre GDS; think about the usability of that system. It also reminds me of how Windows is the most popular OS, despite its design and usability.

[Brian Russo]

TLDR;

Design by committee == problem && != design

And indie bloggers don't understand politics and momentum of large organisations.

But yeah.. that site is pretty bad. I agree with David though that it doesn't really matter for his cited reasons.

Personally I always try to push the 90% solution (Or whatever you think is attainable). I.e. you instantly serve the biggest portion of what people really want to do and sideline the rest. If 1% of your customer base has to dig that's fine - if in exchange it means 20% can do their main task better (Just making up numbers, you get the idea).

[Ken Berkun]

This is great, I've long hated the AA web site, thanks for posting!

Ken