whirledtraveler

http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

What do you think of it? From a usability point of view, it seems much more friendly, less cluttered. The intelligent textual flight search looks good too.

It's a shame he is so vitrolic. He has some good ideas.

blug

That letter has no information. What exactly is the horrific experience? How does the new design solve the problem? What is the new functionality? Don't see anything appealing except the fancy buttons.

dayone

If the guy wants to help reprogram the back-end of the website, we might be on to something.

wdwright

It is a shame that AA doesn't seem to know and/or care that their Web site could be so much better. An example we've all seen - I just selected a departure date in July, and when I click the return calendar, it should pop a July-August calendar up. Instead, it shows May-June. Jet Blue, Southwest and others get it right. Why can't AA? A competent Web designer could fix this in a morning. Users have pointed this out for years, to no avail.

It is a mystery to me that AA's principal sales portal isn't given the priority it deserves.

Guy Betsy

Actually I find AA's website very easy to navigate. This guy has obviously never even ventured near some of the other Oneworld partner's sites like BA or CX where it would take 3x as long to find out something that one can find on AA's site. Sometimes the British web designers think that they are talking to children and has to explain everything in detail so much so that it gets lost in the explanation!

So now if AA is to ever take note of his suggestion and even tweak something, this guy is sure to claim 'copyright' ?

inlanikai

It's a shame his efforts will probably result in a cease and desist letter from AA's legal department for using registered trademarks without permission instead of from their marketing group for the suggestions.

Non-NonRev

I think that aa.com, although it looks a little frumpy and "un-elegant", is a fairly functonal site (especially for the experienced user).

Like others, my major complaints are the quirks and oversights that should have been fixed a long time ago, such as the ultra-annoying situation when, after performing a multi-leg search by price and then going backward to change a data point, the site ALWAYS changes the price/schedule selector back to 'schedule'

nomad1974

Wow, 7 posts on FT and NOBODY has yet noticed how there is a complete lack of mention of AAdvantage on this guy's proposal?! I am rather shocked and slightly disappointed in our community

BStrauss3

The issue has always been the terrible flow on the pages. Two examples:

What is the one thing MOST visitors want to do? Login... where is the login area? As far from the initial cursor position as possible...

When you enter your userid and password, the logical flow is to the checkbox for remember me then to the button (try it here on FT). So tab-enter or space-enter acomplishes the task. Not on AA.com - the tab takes you completely away from the login area you've so carefully navigated to.

It's that kind of user-hostile design that makes AA.com so bad.

-----Burton

brp

This one is truly annoying, and the worst part is that they had it working properly at some point in the past. Now, not so much.


I have firefox remember my information, and I think lesser browsers do that as well. If it's a machine where you want to be remembered, this seems like a simple solution; if public, you don't want to check it anyway. This particular item seems like a complete non-issue.

Cheers.

swag

I agree, my complaints about aa.com are mostly many of the simple little things that should be easy to fix.
- When I search for flights, why on earth doesn't it show me the day of the week along with the date? Most other reservations sites do. Seeing "Friday May 29" would go a long way to avoiding mistakes of accidently choosing the worng date ("Monday June 29" would jump out at me).
- The very final button I click to complete a purchase does not show me what I'm purchasing. If it's final confirmation, then it should redisplay the flights and price right above the button. Ditto for the reservation cancellation process.
- Inconsistent terminology also invites user error. The word "Cancel" is used for everything from the extreme "I want to cancel my tickets" to the trivial "Nevermind, I do not want to change my seat selection".

Eli Gorin

I think when he took his graphics design courses in college he skipped out on an intro to business course where he would have learned that the first thing to not do with a potential client is degrade them.

If this guy really wants to make a difference and have any possible chance of landing AA as a client, the last thing he should do is badmouth them the way he did on an open, public website where anyone (such as the entire FT community) can see. Just plain dumb.

Personally, I dont see anything that special about his site. Sure, it's pretty, but as others have mentioned, the backend is where it counts. AA.com could use a little tweaking to make it slightly "prettier" but focus on the small simple issues in the backend for now.

berlinflyer

What an awfully bad design....OMG (and I am talking about the "new" proposal). As a designer myself (with a masters degree in visual communication), this proposal hurts my eyes

skywalkerLAX

The website he designed looks like from the beginning of the internet era!

Actually IIRC the german website looked similar to this 4 years ago until they finally got rid of it ^

Sorry Curtis, but this proposal will be the joke of the day in all departments this goes through !

Design: F

Mark_T

I think his tag line was rather suitable though :

'Imagine what you could do with a full, totally competent design team.'

as against what one rather mediocre designer can do in a couple of hours ...

In a previous career I managed a graphics design studio for a while and the attitude this guy displays was typical of so many who seemed to be blessed with the gift to see the flaws in everyone else's work and never the problems with their own ...

I'm sure the site could be better, but there is a lot more involved than just trying to slap a 'pretty' front end on the site.