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Great, Another Bootstrap Site

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Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#61

Post by kingsidharth »

cleanshakeapp wrote: post #37
kingsidharth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same. I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bo…

Are you a web designer? Because some folks (yours truly included) don't have great design sense, so putting up a bootstrap site is much better than the alternative 2003 geo-cities look that is just as easy to create. When it comes to the lesser of two evils, i'd choose "less" and bootstrap.

I am a UX designer. Bah let's just call me a designer. Included the "Quick Fix" for people who might not have a great design sense.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#62

Post by jaimzob »

carsongross wrote: post #6

Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. The design community generally doesn't like the idea of standards because they are a creative community, and there is no more damning phrase in the creative communities of the modern era than "unoriginal". But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications: they want to know how to work the things in…

Whenever I see "user's want standardized UIs" what I hear is "it's easier for me to _program_ standardized UIs". Users want UIs that are in-tune with their goals and mental models and if you deliver that, it won't matter what size and shape your buttons are.

Snapping widgets together like lego bricks and declaring the result to be a "good" interface because it adheres to "standards" is sometimes true, but not nearly as often as you would think, and in my experience leads to interfaces that map closely to the underlying system, but not at all to what the user actually wants to do.

It's good that a non-designer can use bootstrap to create a decent looking site, heaven knows the world is not over-burdened with good-looking websites, but neither we nor the "users" want every web page, or every web app, to look the same.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#63

Post by justjimmy »

Bootstrap is great for what the name implies, but when you are delivering the product to the public, it's not good enough.

The perfect example is iOS apps. Can you imagine your designers simply copying and pasting from iOS's default theme? It's very bland, it turns off users before they even use it (which in effect, is bad UX. Bootstrap has both + and -, good UXer will see this and adjust accordingly/depending on the phase of the product). I use this resource for my wireframe/mockups http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/ Personally I won't ever use it in a beta product/website as is.

There's nothing wrong with bootstrapping to map out user flow, and give clear indication a button is a button, a list is a list etc. But when it's time to up your game, give access to the public, default bootstrap visual/color needs to go.

Humans judge a book by its cover. If you release your bootstrap website, users will have to work and over come the barrier of your bland looking site and then decide if it's worth it to try your product.

PS: The point about lawyers have crappy websites and yet we still use them is because our expectations changes depending on the organization. Do we expect government websites to be wow and dazzle us? Do we expect a new Apple product's website to use bootstrap? Do we expect a 2 month old startup website to be featured on Behance's frontpage?

And remember who your early adopters are – if it's people that scours HN or see countless bootstrapped sites, what are they going to think when they see your site? Would they be understanding and go 'Oh its okay - they're a startup, I'll give them some leeway when it comes to visual design' or 'Would they go eff this, these guys don't care about design or visuals. I'll come back later'.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#64

Post by kingsidharth »

typicalrunt wrote: post #13
carsongross wrote: post #6

Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. The design community generally doesn't like the idea of standards because they are a creative community, and there is no more damning phrase in the creative communities of the modern era than "unoriginal". But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications: they want to know how to work the things in…

+1 to this. When I talk to other designers and inevitably get into arguments with them about standards, I try to get them to see it from a consumer's point of view for non-IT products. There are a lot of non-IT products that have the same design: doors to houses, door knobs, rear-view mirrors, tires. The list goes on. While it's fun to see a new design to a Web site/app, even as a techie I sometimes struggle with usi…

Door knobs are not visual style. They are user interface. If all logos looked the same, you'll be in utter confusion. That's what visual design is for. Your unique self.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#65

Post by alecperkins »

erjjones wrote: post #58

+1 for CarsonGross. Bootstrap is a very good thing. AlecPerkins quit your complaining and give us something edifying.

Not my article, though I do think it raises some valid points and would prompt interesting discussion (hence submitting it).

More broadly, it seems as though a lot of people on HN often respond to posts as if the author and submitter are one and the same. I recently saw a post, submitted by Jeremy Ashkenas, about why the author doesn't use CoffeeScript. The top comment directly challenged the submitter, calling out 'his statements', as if he were the author.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#66

Post by parkov »

avolcano wrote: post #5

The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers. I'm sure the idea here is "oh, I'm just making a quick MVP, or even a pre-MVP, or a weekend project, and Bootstrap makes the design super easy!" But if you're not going to change it at all , you might as well stick with browser defaults and not include a stylesheet at all - at this point, uncustomize…

It's easy to tweak the Bootstrap defaults, but trying to keep things as cohesive as the defaults can lead you down the rabbit hole of dependencies. BS 2.0 is a big step up, but I've found that playing only with the values in variables.less doesn't cut it quite yet.

I've tried to hit a sweet spot with Bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com), keeping it a quick-start solution for hackers while adding variety to the defaults.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#68

Post by kappaknight »

kingsidharth wrote: post #20
carsongross wrote: post #6

Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. The design community generally doesn't like the idea of standards because they are a creative community, and there is no more damning phrase in the creative communities of the modern era than "unoriginal". But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications: they want to know how to work the things in…

> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same. I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bo…

Sorry, but do you even remember the days before Bootstrap where developers come to showcase their work? Most of their crap are severely under-styled. Some forms in admin sections don't even have labels because the developers knew what the fields were for, so they never bothered to make it remotely comprehend-able for the rest of the team.

I agree, sites should be styled. Bootstrap makes it amazingly easy for those developers who want to build an MVP. Tweaks are nice, but if you have zero design skills, they may or may not be necessary.

One would be a fool to simply ignore a web project because they were built on Bootstrap. If it's not relevant to your needs, sure, ignore it. If it can help solve your problems, pay attention to the app and don't worry about the design so much. If it makes a ton of money, I'm sure they can re-invest some of that back into making it look better.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#69

Post by ExpiredLink »

avolcano wrote: post #5

The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers. I'm sure the idea here is "oh, I'm just making a quick MVP, or even a pre-MVP, or a weekend project, and Bootstrap makes the design super easy!" But if you're not going to change it at all , you might as well stick with browser defaults and not include a stylesheet at all - at this point, uncustomize…

> The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers.

You have to redo your changes for each new Bootstrap version, right? AFAIK, Bootstrap is not themeable and you better extend it than change it.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#70

Post by barranger »

kingsidharth wrote: post #59
jonknee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Facebook, Twitter and Google all have a nearly identical top bar (sorry, Facebook's is blue). They have billions of page views to analyze and have all come to the same conclusion. > NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Boots…

They are not. It's not just the colors but the visual style. They are different for all three. Conclusion is > have a top bar .. with distinct visual style. > If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win. Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site w…

>Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

If you are relying on the style of your buttons to distinguish your site from all the others, perhaps you should be spending more time on building out the content/functionality of your site.

I often find that designers are more worried about how a site will look in a portfolio than whether the end users will get anything out of the site.

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