- UX guy complains about AA.com being crap and UX guy from AA.com responds – 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."
- Health management goes for ethnic marketing/customization: Asians and diabetes – Rice is a carbohydrate that is particularly unhealthy in large quantities for people with diabetes. That's why doctors and other health care providers are increasingly trying to develop culturally sensitive ways to treat Asians with diabetes – programs that take into account Asian diets, exercise preferences and even personality traits. "Diabetes is primarily a self-managed disease, and you have to try multiple approaches with different patients. But many of those are not culturally appropriate for Asians."
Tags: airlines, asian, business, cholesterol, corporate, cultural, customer, design, diabetes, diet, enterprise, ethnic, ethnicity, exercise, health, innovation, process, relevance, rice, UI, usability, UX, web, webdesign
Regarding the AA.com article … This is a reason why as a designer, contracting with both agencies & in-house teams, I strongly believe in the benefit of employing an outside design firm / agency to at least some extent.
Large corporations using in-house teams, most often, could benefit from having an outsider evaluate their effectiveness in the design process and help them onto a more productive track. Many businesses are concerned about spending when outsourcing design or bringing in consultants, though I know it pays for itself. I more often see businesses trying to “save” from spending by doing it alone, when in reality they spend more and suffer under a less effective system. Having an effective process is equally important as who you hire. Investing in a consultant to evaluate and improve your in house process is worth it.
Benefits of outsourcing design to a firm are having a team with an effective system already in place, the fact that it requires some level of planned organization and communication from the business, it allows the business to focus on what they do best, and decisions are made without concern of climbing a corporate ladder.
Comment by Jennifer Quigley 06.08.09 @ 9:36 amJennifer – those are great points. I’ll add that for much of my career I’ve seen two types of help we offer clients – help them by doing the work and help them by showing them a updated perspective on how the work should be done. We explicitly offer the first and explicitly deliver the first and the second kinda comes for free. There are firms that position themselves on process re-engineering/redesign but that’s not the request we get nor is it appropriate for the customers we currently get.
So it raises some questions about how to best engage with clients in “doing the work” in order to leave them more armed and smarter than when we started together. Fortunately, we’re seeing more clients willing to put more of their own team and their own time into collaborating with us. It creates more rewarding engagements, more mutual reflection, more collaboration, and stickier results. I don’t know how it’s changing their processes, because it’s not a piece they are set up to receive, they are not making explicit choices as a result. I’ve seen some definite changes in organizational practices but I would rather not try to claim that we “delivered” that; more than we were there to model it. As they say, the lightbulb has to want to change.
Comment by Steve Portigal 06.08.09 @ 10:21 am