Blog homeTake the current homepage, pretty much like most homepages for airlines.
I know because I have worked on a few (!)….
Lets muse what a fresh design from scratch would look like – howabout this version from Dustin Curtis?
[Reproduced with permission]
Or howabout this Google style version from Thijs Jacobs?
[Via Flickr, Creative Commons]
Airline website design is more politics than design
The AA UX designer, in response to Dustin’s proposed design, stated that..
the group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning and user experience.
We have a lot of people touching the site and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.
Simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. I have got six of them in my archives.
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 who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome.
The AA UX guy is right. Corporate web projects come with their own set of rules and processes. As one UX designer who works on large scale travel websites keeps reminding me, the UX design of a travel website often ends up reflecting the structure of the organisation behind the site, not the structure of how the user has built their mental model, hence the problems.
I would love a forward thinking airline to take these two designs (and their existing design) and create mockups and put them past some usability testing. Any innovative airlines out there want to back some research?
Read American Airlines’s full response to Dustin Curtis’s redesign from Dustin’s blog
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I like Dustin’s version, much nicer than the current design.
Just a thought, is it the airline’s job to inspire consumers? Looking at the majority of airline websites, they obviously don’t think it is.