Once upon a time, I wrote a World of Warcraft add-on called "SexyMap". Basically, it provided a bunch of functionality for your mini-map, and it made it skinnable in a crapload of interesting ways, so that people could build maps that thematically fit with the rest of their UIs.
As of right now, it is registering at 4,692,196 downloads.
Nobody customizes the damn thing. In every screenshot I've ever seen with someone using it, they're using the default skin. The really creative ones do a hue-shift on the default skin. It ships with a good dozen+ skins, and has an editor built into it to let people easily build more. The only time that functionality has apparently been used is when I was building the initial default skin set.
Default Bootstrap annoys the heck out of me, too, but I've learned that people just don't customize things even if you give them the tools to do it. If it's good enough out of the box, they just leave it alone. Bootstrap is good enough out of the box.
I expect years upon years of default Bootstrap websites. We'd best get used to them now.
Spot on. If your audience is basically anyone outside of the HN echo chamber, then default bootstrap is just fine.
I used to build big internal webapps for big companies. My design skills are only slightly better than those of a drunken orangutan.
After discovering Bootstrap, I used it to build a static prototype of a new system I was pitching to one of my clients. Not only did they spend nearly 10 minutes gushing about how clean and gorgeous and minimal the design was, they approved the project immediately and suggested that I re-skin an older webapp with the same theme.
After I told them that I'd used Bootstrap to build the mockup, they said "Oh yeah, I think one of our other teams is using that too. Good stuff!" I still got credit for being a design genius.
If you are building an app for attorneys, pool cleaners, CPAs, gardeners, insurance agents, property managers, window washers, dog walkers, code enforcers, self-storage facilities, mailbox companies, dentists, or payroll supervisors, then in 99% of the cases, they have never even seen a UI half as beautiful or usable as as the bare default Bootstrap styles.
Niche software is, as a general rule, terrible. It's clunky to use and looks even worse.
So, again, if you're building software for designers or people who hang out on HN all day and get annoyed by UI uniformity, then by all means invest a lot of time and money coming up with something unique. But if you're selling to people somewhere else out there in the greater world, that time and money will be 1000x better spent in getting to know your customers, finding out how to reach them most effectively, and creating a compelling offer.
Hey man, I agree with you. I mean, I used that customized version of bootstrap (that lead me to write this article) to skin an app I was working on and I still hear praises on how awesome it is and how much better it looks than their prior software.
I just feel like that extra nudge of color customization, the new icons and so on could make it shine even more. And honestly, I think just about every dev out there would appreciate it too. I'm not saying spend half a day on it, keep it to 30 minutes max of playing around with it, that's it.
I agree with you and moreover I don't see a problem with default Bootstrap sites.
I know a few dozen restaurant sites alone that I could only dream of being remotely as pleasant to look at as a default Bootstrap site.
The internet has come a long way since the era of Geocities, faux 3D gifs and blink tags, and I am very thankful that there are tools to make a site look passably pleasing with very little effort. I will gladly get used to them.
Bootstrap should come in 25 subtle-variants, and a random one should get picked/compressed/served with each download. Like Magic The Gathering // Pokemon booster packs. Remember those? You never knew what you were going to get.
I agree with you though. Also, most of the customizations I've seen of bootstrap look like garbage. Seeing the same bootstrap styles EVERYWHERE is definitely getting old and annoying, but I have to force myself to remember that Bootstrap is pretty damn cool and had some great design thought put into it.
The variations? Typically: not really. The first example that comes to mind is FoundationDB (a local DC startup woohoo!) but they took Bootstrap and in my opinion made it worse: http://foundationdb.com
I wouldn't necessarily say that the FoundationDB site is bad styling, more that every single info page seems to be a massive wall of text. Could do with some pruning.
> Default Bootstrap annoys the heck out of me, too, but I've learned that people just don't customize things even if you give them the tools to do it. If it's good enough out of the box, they just leave it alone. Bootstrap is good enough out of the box.
It's also the case that most people using Bootstrap are using it because they can't design anything of comparative quality, so most people using it are not in a position to make it better even if they wanted to.
I don't disagree, but I think it's important to make the distinction that the OP's argument isn't "replace Bootstrap with your own framework", it's "tweak it so it doesn't look like you just drove it off the factory floor". He even gives examples of tools you can use to do so. You don't have to be a designer; just tweak the colors and some of the paddings and you have a very different site.
(Hi, thank you guys for letting me monetize my hobby! :D)
The authors of SpeedTree, a game rendering middleware, had the same experience;
> We launched SpeedTree with just a few dozen tree and bush species, assuming that our customers would prefer to bypass the library and develop their own plants. But once our first licensees started sending us screen shots and demos, we were surprised to see many of our original trees in them, little changed from those we had provided in that first small library.
Tools like Bootstrap are a means to an end for a lot of people. It's enough to get theme there, and not be horrible — gets them back to focusing on their original problem.
(Also: thanks for SexyMap, my wife and I loved it! On default settings.)
Good observation, and I think it lines up with the "good enough out of the box" argument.
Most non-designers probably feel lost when trying to come up with an initial design framework, and Bootstrap gets them up and running, then once it passes the "this doesn't suck anymore" line, they just stop worrying about it.
(Glad you enjoyed the addon. On the default settings. :)
Every client that I've ever worked with has asked for a huge degree of customizability: drag-n-drop widgets, WYSIWYG content editing, themes, etc.; invariably, none of it ever gets used.
Your example is too specific in terms of context. Add-ons in WoW are usually minimal in design, out of the way and not attract attention to itself (besides the info it is displaying). Unless your default skin has blinking lights, rainbow colors, detracting the user from actually gleaming the info the addon is displaying, a user has no reason to mess with it.
Bottomline, UI Addons in WoW are meant to be minimal in design (just look at all the popular unit frames, action bars addons, even yours - all minimal and functional). There's no reason to ever jazz up the UI for WoW - that'd be self defeating.
But Bootstrapping is different - it will depend on the function, which stage of the product is at and purpose of the site. Each scenario is different.
I agree that they're different in that website design is very much about building a brand, but a WoW UI is possibly even more in need of good design than a website, because its sole purpose is to provide a tremendous stream of realtime information to the player in a way that will let them manage it all and respond to it quickly. There's much more information to manage, and everyone will want it managed differently, so it seems to reason that people would want to take a tool with flexibility and use that flexibility to mold the display to their preferences. That was certainly my expectation when I was writing it.
The reality was that for whatever reason, people don't - and the default is big and garish, and doesn't fit with their UI at all, and somehow it remains unchanged.
My experience as an author and player is that most addons are not "minimal"; they're often plain, which is not anywhere near to the same thing. My most popular addons (tens of millions of downloads worth!) were also the ones that provided the broadest range of visual customizability, and I've seen a huge range of visual configurations for them. On top of that, SexyMap is definitely the least "minimal" out of the bunch (in terms of skin; it actually makes the UX much more minimal over the default minimap), so I'd expect it to be the most commonly customized, but it practically never is, to the point that "Oh look, a screenshot with a default SexyMap in it" has become a joke among my friends.
When I say minimal, I mean minimal in terms of look/clutterness. Not minimal in terms of function.
Your addon (from screenshot on Curse) is extremely minimal. It just have a map - that's it. It doesn't mean it doesn't have any more fuctions/tweaks. Compared to default UI, where you have strokes on top of strokes, you have those other minimal circles that live around the map, you have all these options. Your addon essentially removed those from the map UI (or hide them till user wants them/turns them on), hence minimalism. You have different skins, but they don't take away from the function of your addon. It's minimalism is constant. Hope that's not making it more confusing.
Thinking more about this, instead of having the players be compared to Twitter Bootstrap users, you (the add on developer) are the bootstrap user. You have all these options to use Blizzard's default UI and color, but you didn't. You made your own :)
> Add-ons in WoW are usually minimal in design. There's no reason to ever jazz up the UI for WoW - that'd be self defeating.
I'd disagree, even the defaults of a lot of the custom UI add-ons were overdone and I had to scale them back. The majority of the people making add-ons aren't designers themselves, so the outcome of their efforts is going to be based on their experience or needs, not necessarily on the idea that UI should be minimal.
Additionally a good portion of these add-ons were made specifically to be very visible and add functionality that was either hidden or not available in the game. Screenshots from some of the top raiding guild members were overwhelmed with buttons, notifications, etc. because if your macro is good and communication is consistent, you just need to focus on these more intentionally-prominent add-ons.
You're saying the exact same thing I am. I mean minimal as in non fluff stuff ie: the gargoyles Blizzard has around their Actions Bars.
Also a reason why WoW Custom UI Addons is a perfect example, because the developers aren't designers, that's why most of them are minimal in aesthetics. So without trying, they're minimizing the visual aspect and focusing on the function already.
Bartender is a good example - tons of customization and tweaks but it's minimal in design. It's just buttons. No fancy background, borders, colors. Just purely the icons.
Perhaps we downloaded different add-ons or I just never found the right one. I had to uninstall quite a few because I was specifically looking for the ability to do clean and simple and instead got really loud and annoying without the depth in customization needed to fix it. Those that did offer the ability to truly extend the interface made it way too tedious to do so. It got to the point where I was trying to find a dev on Curse to help me create better options before ultimately deciding that I didn't want to be tied to supporting something on a game I was already putting too much time into.
I've spent a ton of time customizing my Bootstrap-based site, but I didn't use the available tools.
Why? Because like most programmers, I build things incrementally. The first iteration looked like a typical Bootstrap site until I started to replace default components, such as the navbar, fonts, and buttons.
Overall, I'm not very impressed with customization tools, and I'm sure real designers would be even less apt to use them since it's easier to write some extra CSS.
Agreed. Look, I'm not saying do this for everything but if you want to stick with Bootstrap default or don't want to mess with the settings too much, or just aren't a front-end dev per se, at least use those techniques stated in the article. I did it for my own projects but I've also built other projects where I just pasted in some BS stuff that I found fitting (for example, their table styles).
Rather than stick with the default (for rapid app/site devs), spend that extra small amount of time to make your product distinct.
If you're working long-term on a larger project, i don't suggest this as the route to take (ie. customize bs and just stick with that) and agree with you that things SHOULD be more customized to what you need.
I find as a programmer/business person of ONE, if I spend too much time customizing at the onset I'll spend way too much time on things that won't matter.
Customization, colors, etc can come later when I get all my other things done.
It literally took me 10 minutes to change some colours and adjust some border radius sizes. That coupled with not using the big ticket bootstrap navbar left me with a site that was not obviously Twitter Bootstrapped. I am not a designer.
I've found there is an interesting corollary to this: a good default configuration is more likely to make your product* successful than a poor default configuration with a lot of customization options.
I'm not saying that products shouldn't strive to be as customizable as possible, just that providing the product with a set of sensible defaults will go a long way in adoption.
* I use product loosely: anything from text-editors, phones, cars, subway sandwiches.
Completely agree. I think sites that customize bootstrap should have presets that you can work of.
I'm not a designer so when I see so many options I'm overwhelmed and don't really know where to start, but if they gave different presets that you could preview then you could find the one that best suits you and modify small things you'd like to change.
Right right, check out boottheme and some of the other resources in the article! Boottheme shows you everything RIGHT THERE. You can even do a "dice roll" and have colors/settings scrambled to your liking. The scrambler actually works pretty well too and half the results aren't too bad either.
I did exactly the same thing -- was looking at boottheme and wondering how to generate something other than the default. Never occurred to me to wonder what the dice icon did.
Is there a crazy reason that why a project owner couldn't from the server side define 7 or so different sane default versions of their GUI and serve them at random from the same download link so that some of the work would be put to use?
As we are now working in the post-Bootstrap era, if I ever put out a GUI library, I think I might do just that.
I can personally attest to you being wrong. I skinned the hell out of Sexymap. Thanks, btw, you made my life a lot easier, and I actually primarily used your mod to figure out LUA.
As of right now, it is registering at 4,692,196 downloads.
Nobody customizes the damn thing. In every screenshot I've ever seen with someone using it, they're using the default skin. The really creative ones do a hue-shift on the default skin. It ships with a good dozen+ skins, and has an editor built into it to let people easily build more. The only time that functionality has apparently been used is when I was building the initial default skin set.
Default Bootstrap annoys the heck out of me, too, but I've learned that people just don't customize things even if you give them the tools to do it. If it's good enough out of the box, they just leave it alone. Bootstrap is good enough out of the box.
I expect years upon years of default Bootstrap websites. We'd best get used to them now.