Dear American Airlines | Dustin Curtis
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

I redesigned your website's front page, and I'd like to get your opinion.

"I’m a user interface designer. I travel sometimes. Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your website, aa.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to fly your airline again. But before we part ways, I have a couple questions and three suggestions for you."

Time to let good people work : "Dear American Airlines, I re-designed your website", + fascinating response from AA -

But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like. I'm referring to the new kind of brand, the one is formed by the entire experience of a customer's interaction. That experience gets branded into his or her memory and leaks into the buzz of modern culture. via Caitlin

UX guy reprints email and then attempts to address corporate culture issue; strong opinions follow but most compelling part is the insight from the AA.com UX guy himself (known as Mr. X) "But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like."

complain about a corporate website then get surprised to hear about how design under corporate politics work? hm.

"There's a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it's none of those. It's taste."

digg_url = 'http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/how-self-defeating-corporate-design-process-one-designer-finds-ou'; digg_skin = 'compact'; Designer Dustin Curtis was so disgusted with the American Airlines Web site that he redesigned it, and posted the results as an open letter to the company.