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 instinctively and not learn another UI for this or that task.
As a small example: with bootstrap, buttons look the same, so users instinctively recognize them without additional mental effort. Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right".
I think bootstrap, and the non-coercive standardization of web applications it is fostering, is one of the most important developments of 2011-2012.
I do think means there will be less need for straight-up aesthetic designers, with UX and information architecture becoming more important.
> 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 Bootstrap. because there is nothing special,visually, to remember. No visual cue.
> Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right".
That's cool if you are building for just developers. But when it comes to non-devs, you don't want to confuse them, visually, with some other website. Remember, for many Facebook is a that "blue" site. With so many people taking bootstrap as it is, it's going to be... un-special.
I remember my friend discovering facebook themed Tumblr theme. People actually confused it with facebook and made comments like
"Why can't I update my status?"
"Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my fb?"
..
Also, the author is not saying Bootstrap is bad. In fact, it's good that you can focus on dev and have good defaults on CSS and design. But leaving it there is BAD. (read above, why). Take it forward.
Quick Fix: Don't use the Bootstrap top bar. Seriously, that's one major shift.
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 . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same.
It depends on your goal. If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win. If you used Netscape back in the day you can use Chrome today and not have trouble. Consistency itself can be beautiful.
If you're making a marketing site, then your designer can go wild (as long as everything is being tested for effectiveness).
I don't think anyone is complaining about the structural similarities between bootstrap sites. If 50% of the sites out there had fixed top-bar navs and responsive content made of three columns under a hero panel, everyone would win. The question is why everyone has light-black Helvetica Neue text on grey and white backgrounds with blue accents, with aqua-blue gradient pill buttons everywhere.
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 with someone else's.
>Consistency itself can be beautiful.
Yes, same with search engines, if you used Google you can use Yahoo. But still their visual design is different in many ways if not search result. You can tell Yahoo from Google but not two Bootstrap sites.
Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.
>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.
Do you get confused when you run native apps on your Mac? Like, you can't recall which app does which because they all use native controls with a standard L & F? If you do, this is a usability concern I've not heard of and would love more research into. Most usability studies focus on how effectively one can perform a task in an app, not how quickly one can recollect which application performs which function for them, so it may just not be well-studied.
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.
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.
To be honest, I'd prefer Amazon to use Bootstrap with a yellow branded bar at the top, ditto Facebook (with FB blue). Ditto for any flight search website. Anything that's an "application". With blogs however, I don't want to see it resembling the default.
To clear few things up lets discuss why Bootstrap is here.
Bootstrap should be taken as a base where from we can start building our applications right away while being real agile cause it provides us with mostly used design patterns and interactions which if we require can differ from in our design iterations (!imp).
So again its essentially a framework providing some conventional patterns for development which I presume is bit like convention over configuration paradigm.
I would agree with the point that visual style matters as its is something which will molds into your brand identity and must be unique as all products are unique in one way or other. So yes its really a fail when most of the developers choose to maintain same Visual style in their sites which is to me is an utter disrespect of brand identity and something that must be avoided.
>Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.
As far as Usability is concerned to my understanding it is not affected in any way by fact that 2 sites have visually similar buttons but it is rather defined on the basis of content they provide and how it is presented(!imp). Difference between usability and visual appearance is quite understood I guess.
Bootstrap is not for Amazon or Facebook. We're talking about websites for wrestling events in the UK -- literally one of the sites in the gallery that the author links to -- and other such things that really do not need to present any sort of ground-breaking, or even interesting, visual design.
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 using the sexiest websites simply because the designer has changed what I perceive to be a standard usability feature. I can't imagine what Joe 6-Pack thinks when he encounters these sites.
I find this and the parent to be flawed. Door, knobs and so on come in a wide variety of shapes, materials and colors; and so do buttons (open an explorer or finder window - almost every means of interacting with these relies on a button, and they vary widely in appearance.)
The argument this blog post makes isn't that there's a problem with standards, but that a lot of people are using bootstrap without any modification - which is ironic, because modifying bootstrap is vastly easier and safer than creating a new design from scratch.
It takes very little to adjust the colors of the buttons provided by bootstrap, or the links, or add a texture to the background, or change some fonts out (Google webfonts makes this ridiculously easy). When this isn't done, the site leaves no lasting impression unless what it provides is so amazing I can't possibly forget it (this is pretty rare).
For me, power tools would be something that goes at the far functional end of a functional/aesthetic design scale, and even then companies will use widely different colors to separate themselves from their competitors and make them easy to recognize. Perhaps there's something to be learned there.
But for a lot of things, I really don't care if it leaves an impression or not. I just want the thing to work well for my users. Bootstrap provides me with (almost) everything I need to do that. I'm not saying custom design isn't important or doesn't add value, I'm just saying it doesn't always do.
While most knobs looks similar, you always can see before even touching whether this knob is a rotating one or just press a handle. Furthermore, I have never seen a door with a knob to be placed 10 inches from the ceiling (or the floor), something that would definitely be considered "original" and "nonstandard".
There's a difference between unique style, and unique function. It's possible to have a unique style while still taking advantage of existing affordances. The visual style has to work with the affordance for it to be useful, but they aren't in lock-step.
For example, both a button with a gradient simulating a curved surface with top-down lighting, and a button with flat color but a drop shadow indicate they are to be pressed. But, both can have a very different visual impact.
The same is true of knobs, switches, push bars, and so on. It's possible to vary the style without straying from the established affordances present. The article's point about Bootstrap is that people are given a factory for making different color doors and windows, but not bothering to change the colors despite the ease of doing so that the framework provides. The result being that the houses are all starting to look kind of dull.
If the button requires click and drag, like the shutter button for Mattebox on the iPhone, then it's unique compared to the other ordinary shutter buttons, even though visually it's barely different. (Fortunately, it's different enough to indicate what needs to be done — affordance.) That's a fairly unique interaction, certainly within camera apps, that doesn't require much style differentiation.
Using the door handle metaphor, and example would be a handle that's a few inches from the floor and looks almost the same as a handle at 32 inches but is better served by pressing with your foot. Visually the same but very different interactions.
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.
I wholeheartedly agree. This is one of my major gripes with web apps replacing native ones. I never have to figure out what's a button or a tab on a native app. It seems these two concepts get reinvented ad nauseum with web design, such that I have a hard time figuring out what to interact with or how on many sites. This tends to end up in a cyclic argument of "well, if it were well-designed, it'd be obvious." But, if it looked the same, it'd be even more obvious.
The other half to this is I care more about content & usability than aesthetics. Bootstrap lets me produce and consume content more readily. So, I'm a fan.
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.
I wholeheartedly disagree. While power-users might "want UIs that are in-tune with their goals and mental models" I have helped my parents navigate computers enough to know that a great number of users have no mental model at all. All they know is that the button that gets to their email is third from the left on the bottom -- heaven forbid you change that.
It absolutely is beneficial to a newbie to say "Oh! This site looks a lot like xyz.com, maybe I can log in with this button."
Strong points. But from a usability perspective, Bootstrap would be much more significant if it were opinionated about interactions instead of just gradients, whitespace, and CTA placement.
The examples list of beautiful, usable, and identifiable products and services is long. People learn new patterns quickly - you just have to do a decent job designing the pattern.
Bootstrap's "non-coercive standards" are really just CSS shorthand for an approximation of Apple's successful, so-simple-it-feels-generic, already-easy-to-copy example. Anyone who never invested in a brand or consistent visual language before (and therefore simply wouldn't have a brand or consistent visual language) now just piggybacks Apple's aesthetic. Bootstrap is a small step further on the already well-worth path.
As a web programmer I understand where you're coming from, but as a UX designer I whole heartedly disagree.
Bootstrap is a wonderful tool for getting your app out there without having to do much on a design level. But I believe that websites with a distinct look and easy UI that reflects their functionality is way better than a monotonous string of websites with no distinction between their design.
For instance Twitter's design is beautifully streamlined for it's functionality, which is to show a constant flow of micro-information. As opposed to HN's listed threads which show link based data. These designs even though they differ seem "natural" based on their functionality and require little to no mental effort.
Good UX does not require mental effort.
Furthermore, a unique look is how others identify sites. It's Twitter's UI looked exactly like Facebook's, more would have trouble distinguishing the two. This would hurt the site's capability to make an impression in the user's memory.
With no distinction between websites, how will the casual user remember you?
Spot on. However, I would add that much of the push for 'original' designs come from many other sources beside the designer. I can not tell you how many times I have had clients request all manner of non-standard layouts and other customization to make the website look cool/unique/fresh...
It doesn't give us a same standard, it gives us Twitter's version of a standard. You're points are almost totally right and certainly reasonable but the big problem is that a lot of sites are ending up just looking Bootstrap clones of each other with different names and logos. Standards are great and I'm all for them but for the love of god, please at least make it your own. Making it your own does not mean you have to deviate from any standard and that's a big part of what the author was getting at.
As a small example: with bootstrap, buttons look the same, so users instinctively recognize them without additional mental effort. Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right".
I think bootstrap, and the non-coercive standardization of web applications it is fostering, is one of the most important developments of 2011-2012.
I do think means there will be less need for straight-up aesthetic designers, with UX and information architecture becoming more important.