Fair points, Jared. Although in actual fact, in most states people can be fired for any or no reason - that's called "employment at will." There would need to be a process, of course, to validate that there was no discrimination in the termination and they prefer to have some kind of paper trail. In this case, it would be a no-brainer as the employee almost certainly violated company confidentiality obligations.
Dustin's design may not be successful, but it's not because he doesn't understand AA's "business model" - which was my point. As an aside, it's disheartening that another IxDA thread needs to devolve into dueling minutiae... Nicholas Gould CEO Catalyst Group v: (212) 243-7777 x203 f: (646) 390-5658 e: ngo...@catalystnyc.com t: twitter.com/nickgould b: www.catalystnyc.com/cofactors w: www.catalystnyc.com -----Original Message----- From: Jared Spool [mailto:jsp...@uie.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 4:53 PM To: Nick Gould Cc: disc...@ixda.org Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Dustin Curtis, UX Design, and American Airlines On Nov 24, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Nick Gould wrote: > 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. To be fair, we haven't heard AA's management's side of this. We don't know if the AA employee had a record of reckless behavior. We don't know if there were other incidents involved. We don't even know if the story of discovering the employee through the Exchange logs is even true. AA is a company that has union rules to follow. While the designer wasn't likely a union member, a company that large with those constraints typically has huge HR constraints. They can't fire someone on a whim, without proper warnings and documentation. So, I'm betting there's more to this story than we know. I think it's foolish of us to reach judgements based on conjecture and hearsay about what happened. > 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. In fact, we have no evidence that Dustin's design is actually user- centric. Have you used it? Have you seen anyone use it? It looks great. It smells great. But, does it, in fact, do the job it needs to do? Again, it feels like we're jumping to conclusions here. Jared ________________________________________________________________ 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
