Designers should be arbiters of truth - Mr. X of American Airlines

by whalesalad • 17 years ago

80 45 17 years ago

dkarl• 17 years ago

Mr. X points out how they make money off people who forget, lose, or simply discard their gift cards. They also make extra money off people who are compulsively responsible about their cards. After all, the easiest way to make sure you use the card before it expires and "get your money's worth" is to make a purchase that you are sure will drain the entire card. The less sure you are about the remaining balance, the bigger that purchase will be. The same thing goes for getting all those damn gift cards out of your wallet after your birthday so you don't develop a spinal deformity from storing them under one butt cheek.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

> The same thing goes for getting all those damn gift cards out of your wallet after your birthday so you don't develop a spinal deformity from storing them under one butt cheek.

I've been carrying my wallet in my front pocket for years for this exact reason.

(Not really related to the topic, I know.)

Seriously though, I had back pain for quite a while. My doctor asked if I did a lot of sitting. When I said yes, he told me to take things out of my pockets when I would be sitting for a while. This was kind of a pain, so I just started using only the front pockets.

Osmose• 17 years ago

I've always thought it natural to carry my wallet in my front pockets. Any particular reason why most people use the back?

treblig• 17 years ago

I think I've come to accept that my gift cards will expire at some point. I'm not sure I'd be horrifically broken up if I went to use a card after a year, and it was no longer active. In fact, if the card worked, I'm not even sure I'd notice to appreciate the company's noble efforts.

Granted, a great user experience should be so seamless that the customer never even considers it, but I'm sure that there are some great brands out there that allow their gift cards to expire. I doubt their image has struggled enormously. Can anyone name examples or give stories?

I love the spirit of the article, though. Arbiters of the truth, indeed.

nudist• 17 years ago

Actually -- and this is new in 2009 -- gift cards cannot expire by law in California.

fhars• 17 years ago

Same thing in germany. Shops can put an expiration date on their cards, but that just means they have to pay a full refund in cash from that day on (they have alredy benefited enough from the interest free credit extended to them by the giver of the card). So good consumer protection laws are not only just, but also beautiful, as they discourage bad web design :-).

bradgessler• 17 years ago

  In the end, the gift card idea evaporated as quickly as it
  was conceived, so I didn't need to stand up and object to 
  slimy tactics.

Did anybody else think the ending was anti-climatic? Mr. X was, "standing up for the truth," but he ended up not standing up for anything because the project got canceled.

MichaelApproved2• 17 years ago

I felt the exact same way. When I read that part the whole thing just sounded so pretentious.

He doesn't even say why it evaporated. Maybe someone else in the company actually did say something.

mseebach2• 17 years ago

Maybe it was cancelled because someone else actually had the guts to explain how it was deceitful.

brandon272• 17 years ago

This post is a bit whimsical for my taste. The author seems to imply that it's the job of a designer to rise above the ordinary requirements of their job and insert some kind of politically-charged influence into their day to day work and their interactions with non-designer co-workers, based on what they feel is good or effective design, even if it does not align with the broader corporate strategy.

As for the gift card anecdote used in the article, it doesn't take a good designer, or even a designer at all to realize that "hiding" a customer's gift card balance, or making it difficult to access, is an underhanded thing to do. I think it has little to do with design and more to do with a company's culture and true relationship with their customers.

unalone3• 17 years ago

The suggestion in the article seems to be that only designers are noble people, which is a bit silly.

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

Agreed, there's no need for designers to be treated as some sort of cadre of white knights. This is just basic business ethics - you could find similar situations in any job at any company.

seldo• 17 years ago

So Mister X's implication, in context, is that American Airlines' website is so deviously and incredibly terrible not because they're incompetent, but because they would rather you didn't use it.

Having been a customer of AA before vowing in disgust never to let them take a penny from me ever again, I surmise that the hidden plan here is to make you call their customer-service agents to book or change your ticket, since you can't work out how to do it on the website. At AA, calling them to book means a $35 extra fee on top of your ticket.

So that's it? They have the worst website in the industry just to screw their customers for a lousy $35?

gaius• 17 years ago

I'd be willing to be Ryanair and Easyjet have the same strategy. They want you to call their premium-rate numbers.

Any savvy traveler knows, the "budget" in budget airlines refers only to their operations, not the final price you pay once all the fees, transfers etc are tacked on.

smiler• 17 years ago

Nope, they don't want you to call their premium rate numbers. I've booked many EasyJet flights and never had to phone them. With EasyJet you can even swap your flight for an earlier / later one (for an extra fee of course) online. It's completely self service on the web.

Even with premium rate phone numbers, call centres are still expensive.

Kliment3• 17 years ago

They hate people calling them. It's a terrible experience. They want you to do everything on their website, and go out of their way to make it difficult to contact them directly. Ryanair is notorious for charging for absolutely everything (Checkin fee? Seriously? Like you can opt out of that.)

PanMan• 17 years ago

I don't think so: Most premium-rate callcentres still lose money. It's not that easy to make a profit on 50 cts/min, of which half goes to the telco's.

authentic• 17 years ago

come on, my fiancee booked a flight for EUR 17 round trip recently, including their credit card handling fee (which can be avoided by using visa electron). if that's not budget then i don't know what is. i have booked GBP 20 round trip flights with ryanair or easyjet numerous times, you just have to know how to play their special offers game and be somewhat flexible on dates. often, getting to the airport or parking costs me more than the actual flight. if treating incompetent customers badly enables these prices then so be it.

Kliment3• 17 years ago

No, they don't want you to figure out their pricing model. They want to ask you a lot of questions, make you go through a lot of steps, and then present you with a price, making you go through the process again to compare prices. This hinders price shopping, and this is why online price comparison services are so popular.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

Why would they intentionally make it difficult to compare prices when travel agents and price comparison sites make it easy? I am pretty sure AA thinks that their website is the easiest way to book AA flights. If you disagree, you can get the same fares elsewhere trivially.

The "search by price and schedule" feature makes it easy to see what options you have on AA if you choose to go that route. Without even clicking anything, you can see the effects of leaving on a different day, choosing a different fare class, or taking a connecting flight versus flying nonstop. This makes it pretty easy to compare. (It is arguable that there are too many options. But this is becuase air travel is expensive by default, and people want cheap. So there are a lot of "discounted" fares around. If you don't want hassle, pick "search by schedule" for the search type, and "economy without restrictions" for the fare type. You will have your ticket in seconds, won't have to pay for checked bags, will have the option of paying $50 to upgrade to first class, and can cancel or change the ticket at any time with no fee. The only downside is that the ticket will cost 10x as much.)

jrockway4• 17 years ago

If you call Reservations it's $35. If you call "Web Services", it's free. I think the site says something to this effect.

antimora• 17 years ago

This reminded me the iTunes that makes impossible to find an option, which I found by accident, to purchase Standard Definition videos (costs $1.99) vs. High Definition ($2.99).

As a challenge try finding that toggle I am talking about. Try purchasing an episode in Standard Definition of season 13 of south park, for example. You will be surprised to see where it's.

yardie• 17 years ago

It's on the left. In yellows letters against a black background 'In Standard Definition'. It's not too nefarious. Unlike how they used to hide the iTunes Plus setting (when you could order the higher quality DRM free version or be shown the DRM loaded version).

tlb• 17 years ago

I read the whole thing through thinking "this doesn't sound like Dustin." I not sure I understand the custom of guest blog entries.

Why doesn't Mr. X publish this on his own blog? It's a decent article -- why not build up his own blog's reputation? Is he trying to reach a wider audience by pulpit-hopping? I was more inclined to click on the link because I saw the domain name and usually like Dustin's blog entries, so is Dustin leveraging his brand or just diluting it?

symptic• 17 years ago

Dustin was the cause of Mr. X losing his job, so I have a hunch he feels like he needs to give the man whatever help he can. And the point of the guest post is to leverage Dustin's reader base to build attention to his name. His blog gets barely 1/50 the traffic Dustin does, I'll guarantee it. Now it's probably closer to 1/20. Sounds good to me.

balakk• 17 years ago

I'm more puzzled that somebody who ostensibly used to train intelligence analysts, got removed for such an indiscretion. Did he think he wouldn't get caught out, or he simply didn't care? If he didn't care, why the Mr.X bit?

natfriedman2• 17 years ago

"Arbiters of truth" ? Smug self-righteousness and self congratulation seem to get a lot of upvotes on Hacker News.

unalone3• 17 years ago

Are you surprised by that? This is a site sponsored by an organization that looks for elite people in order to sponsor them as they start businesses. As a result, a large part of the crowd here consists of people who either think they're elite or who want to learn how to be elite.

Combine that with the fact that computer people have a tendency towards being smug/rude/insecure, and you have an audience that's drawn like a magnet towards anything remotely congratulatory.

madair2• 17 years ago

If by elite people you mean talented entrepreneurs then you might have something ;-)

natfriedman2• 17 years ago

Good point.

And some degree of overconfidence and maybe hubris is perhaps necessary to start a company and to suffer the slings and arrows of that experience long enough to have a shot at success.

Channel that kind of energy into creating something useful, and you can do a lot of good in the world.

So it comes with the territory. But the self-applause can get a little monotonous when there isn't also interesting new content.

onewland• 17 years ago

Kind of a simplistic post, but one thing I did like was the pink dot at the end of the first column and the beginning of the second. It gave a really clear indication that you didn't have to scroll past the bottom of the quote to continue reading the text. I'd like to see this convention get used more in the magazine-style blogs where formatting is not quite as predictable.

mhb• 17 years ago

Thanks. Now I can stop looking for the associated footnote at the bottom of the page. I couldn't figure out what that dot was doing there.

pierrefar• 17 years ago

The formatting is very disconnected from how people read things on screens. Needing a pink dot in the first place is symptom of that problem.

Designers should be arbiters of truth - Mr. X of American Airlines

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