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

Leave a Comment

You are not logged in, so a moderator will need to approve your comment before it appears on this page.

Name:

Email:

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:

Comments