I’ve been watching Dustin Curtis’s dust-up with American Airlines since his original post in May, so I was certainly interested to read last month that American Airlines had fired the employee (“Mr. X”) who wrote to explain the design process and complications behind AmericanAirlines.com.

The responses have been unusually split, with some claiming the incident is about bad customer engagement and others claiming it’s about bad self-promotion. Both arguments have been made well (I especially like this take on it), so instead of rehashing them, I took the opportunity to chat with Projectline consultant and user experience expert John Shields about why Dustin Curtis and American Airlines seem to have missed each others’ points. Here’s what I asked and what I learned:

Seems there’s a huge gap between a single person designing an ideal homepage and the day-to-day functioning of a large-scale corporate web presence. What are the biggest contributors to that gap?

• First off, there are often several teams that need to be involved: tech, marketing, legal, and sales—at the very least. They all have different priorities and strengths, so with all that help a website can wind up looking like Frankenstein’s monster. But, at the enterprise level, none of them are optional. You can’t just throw them out in favor of an ideal design because the stakes are too high and their contributions are often vital.
• In an established organization, you’re never starting from scratch. You can’t. There are old databases, old content, and old workflows. Each is there for a reason. In order to move from a site bound by the old processes to a site that looks and feels fresh, you need a business analyst to make sense of why the old systems are there and where they can afford to change.
• A large website isn’t a one-time thing; it’s a process. Throwing up a new design or a new feature is all well and good, but the ongoing maintenance and support is where the real work gets done. Without a web team (or at least a person) to be the gatekeeper, even the prettiest minimalist design will be a hodgepodge in no time.
• User experience means a lot beyond the homepage. In a large company, maintaining a smooth user experience depends completely on having someone (or several someones) willing and empowered to fight for the customer’s needs.

Wow. Sounds hard. How does anyone do all that?

It’s mostly a matter of two things: a design vision and a business unit that can drive it. A dream-design is a great thing to have, but you have to be able to take that to other stakeholders and work towards a compromise that works for them. To keep things under control and sustain that vision, you need a team in charge of the website in the long term—it might be an internal team, an embedded program manager, an external web team, or some combination, but they have to be empowered to keep putting the customer first and serve as gatekeepers for all the other stuff that tends to wander into websites and muck them up. With that in place, it’s pretty phenomenal the kind of difference you can see in usability, customer responses, and revenue. It might be tough, but it’s worth it.