It's hard for an independent designer to get attention and showcase his talents or design perspective. I give Dustin a lot of credit for putting his work out there. And, at first, when the initial response from the AA employee came in, it was a kind of exciting example of how real, productive conversations about real, frustrating design challenges (including political, organizational challenges) can emerge out of efforts like Dustin's. In retrospect, it was unwise for the employee to allow the verbatim text of his email to be published. And, while it's not surprising or even "wrong" that the employee was terminated, it really is a shame that something that started with good intentions ended badly. I'm sure that Dustin feels terrible about the outcome.
But Dustin is not the first / only person to critique or redesign a public site as a way of getting attention. In fact, I just ran across these guys who critique homepages to showcase their commenting tool: https://zurb.notableapp.com/website-feedback/17215/TechCrunch-Deconstructed To some, Dustin's idea might seem presumptuous and naive, and his work is very easy to dismiss as being unencumbered by the internal realities at AA. I think that's a fair criticism. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth mentioning, discussing, considering on a board like this. If nothing else, it's interesting that the whole event got so much attention... Todd: The AA employee didn't "post to a public forum," he sent an email to Dustin and then foolishly allowed it to be published anonymously. AA then searched its Exchange logs for the text in order to identify and fire him. Also, I fail to see what any of this has to to with the AA "business model." Dustin well understood the business but ignored the political obstacles in the way of creating a purely user-centric aa.com. In my experience, a company's internal politics often cause it to act in contravention of it's obvious business interests. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47591 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
