The American Airlines/Mr X/Dustin Curtis Fiasco
November 5, 2009 6:56 pmI’ve been following this fiasco as its come out (via HackerNews, for me at least) and a blogger has fired back! The tubes are an unfriendly place if you run your mouth enough I guess..
Back in May of this year, a then 21-year-old designer named Dustin Curtis wrote a blog post called Dear AmericanAirlines in which he redesigned (read: moved some pixels around in Photoshop) their homepage, called them names, called into question their business strategy, and then called for the firing of their entire design team, “[who are] obviously incapable of building a good experience.”
Setting aside the arrogance of an article centered on an unsolicited JPG of the easiest page of a site to tackle—he “spent a couple hours redesigning [their] front page”—I’m amazed that anyone purporting to be a professional interface designer would assume a night of Photoshop earns them the right to be smug. It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function. It’s easy to look at their site versus your comp and go, “See, mine’s better. You guys must really suck at this.”
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Tags: American Airlines,Development,software engineering,UI,UX
Categories: Technology, Work
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. Once again, who doesn’t love functional programming…
