"It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise

"It’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function." Wait... what? None of this makes much sense at all. "Metrics"? Metrics for what? A metric is just a way of measuring things. What are we measuring? Pixels? Number of visitors? Number of bytes transferred? "Creative direction"? Again, what does that mean, exactly? It's an airline website. It's supposed to be elegant and functional, not a work of postmodernist art. "Business acumen"? Business = getting people to pay you, and people will be more inclined to pay you, all other things being equal, if your website is better designed. Is there some reason why a website redesign would cause AA to lose money? The cost of designing a website is trivial, in comparison to AA's annual budget of $22,935,000,000. "Sales experience"? "Sales" usually means selling things to people in person, or over the phone, which is a very different business from designing a website to sell people things (ask anyone who's done both). "Actual functionality" is the only legitimate criticism here. It's quite a bit harder to make a website that actually works than to draw it. "Enterprise scale" is a myth. Justin.TV, according to their website, currently has 29 employees (including the founders). Justin.TV's Alexa rank is #222. American Airlines has 85,500 employees, and their website is less popular (rank #1,465), and almost certainly requires less bandwidth and storage space to boot. I won't comment on whether the guy is or isn't a jerk, but the ability to spit out a long list of fancy words ("metrics"? Come on) does not a legitimate criticism make.