Published on January 27th, 2010

User Experience and Corporate Decision Making

As @c2austin pointed out yesterday, Fast Company's Twitter stream recently rehashed an ongoing debate about website user experience design in large corporations and the potential havoc having too many departments involved in the design process can have. The Fast Company article, which you can read in its entirety here, describes how a peeved designer wrote an open letter to American Airlines blasting such a high-profile company for having a website that is incredibly difficult from a usability standpoint. He wrote:

If I was running a company with the distinction and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed--no ashamed--to have a Web site with a customer experience as terrible as the one you have now...Your Web site is abusive to your customers, it is limiting your revenue possibilities, and it is permanently destroying the brand and image of your company in the mind of every visitor.

To prove his point, he even donated some time and offered up a solution, seen here as compared to the original:


His open letter actually received a response from a member of the user experience team at American Airlines explaining that, unfortunately, it's not their lack of abilities, but rather the sheer size of the company and numerous corporate layers and that inhibit them from delivering a positive user experience.

Sad. But true. It highlights a problem that we wrestle with often when clients come to us to deliver a new interactive experience for their business: Too many cooks in the kitchen. While at times we understand the need for more than one party within a company to be responsible for making design decisions, we also feel strongly that the best designs come from a clear, singular vision. This vision, combined with a solid understanding of user wants/needs, and an interactive design team adept at creating the best possible solution will always result in a stronger end product than anything that comes from design by committee.

by Garret Ohm

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Published on January 15th, 2010

Help Haiti

We've been watching the developments over in Haiti in light of this week's tragic earthquake and have been compelled to do our part to help in any way we can. You can see a full list of organizations you can help support HERE, but we wanted to highlight a few creative ways we found that folks are raising money and awareness for the cause. One one the best was the Red Cross's use of mobile giving, which to date has raised over $10,000,000 in increments of $10. Within hours of the disaster, the Red Cross had set up a system whereby donors could text the word "Haiti" to 90999 and a donation of $10 would automatically be given to Haitian relief efforts. The technology made the process seamless and the word spread like wildfire through social media channels as well as in traditional media.

One of the other more creative support mechanisms I've seen was passed along by our friends at BFFB. It's a website called Avatar for Haiti, and it's based on the premise of donating the price you'd pay to go see the film (again) in theaters to relief efforts instead (UNICEF). It's not that they're encouraging people not to see Avatar. They're just saying that if you've already seen it and are thinking about going again, maybe you can donate that money instead--and they're giving you an easy, seamless way to do it. Pretty creative, and impressive that they responded so quickly with the idea and the development of the site!

by Garret Ohm

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