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'.
> 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
i recognize UX is really important in ios, especially since a lot of ios apps target the $1 casual user market. There are a lot of other markets and types of business, for example enterprise webapps, where a product which solves their business need matters, and using a stock theme does not matter, we don't even have a designer on staff.
This. The choice is not often between "custom, distinctive looking design" and "boring standard design", but between a standard design or theme and someone using comic sans and a windows 'hotdog' theme for inspiration.
To rephrase: "[I think it's] very bland, it turns off [myself] before [I] even use it." It'd surprise me if most users pay enough attention to even see that a Bootstrap button looks different from a 37signals button or a Facebook button.
Bootstrap provides a bunch of reusable elements. You can still make the non-reusable elements (the layout chrome, logo etc.) as pretty/ugly as you want, and you can use those reusable elements to create very bland or very inspired websites.
"It'd surprise me if most users pay enough attention to even see that a Bootstrap button looks different from a 37signals button or a Facebook button."
There's a big difference between what a user can articulate about their experience and what they are affected by.
Utilitarianism has long been a core principle of good design. When I travel around the country, I don't bemoan the lack of variation and design esthetic in all the street signs I encounter. Similarly, there is a broad class of utility apps for which Bootstrap is a great standardization influence.
Because you don't expect street signs to be visually pleasing. You expect a certain look from street signs because they all share the same function.
But startups come from various fields and solve various problems, provide different services and products. Should we shift our expectations that all startup sites will use templates now?
Your startup is not a special snowflake. Your buttons and menus and checkboxes work just like everybody else's. Your buttons can look just like everyone else's buttons. You know what your users will say? "Oh! It works just like X, I know X, this is easy!".
I actually think iOS is a terrible example, and that Apple apps are undoing years of good design lately. One of my favorite features about my Android phone (despite that fact that all the apps are still laid out however the designers feel) is that there is some consistent UI and I can navigate more quickly by using the menu, back and find buttons which provide a consistent way to find the settings in any random app, or to find the search feature.
I too don't really understand that backwards patterns were creating with the web, i.e. when a few years ago modal dialogs got much more popular (i.e. jquery-ui, etc). I remember not too long ago in the mid 90s when every magazine was awash with complaints about apps that had too many modal dialogs, saying they were bad for user experience, which was generally true.
Those things are pretty consistent in iOS too, if you follow the pretty well laid out conventions. Settings are in the settings app, search is at the top of a list etc.
I guess the difference is with hardware buttons the app has little ability to effectively change the behaviour, whereas with software conventions they can pick and choose what they follow.
There are a few reasons that design resists commodification - one of them is that it's like peacock feathers. A well-designed site or app signals that the creator invested resources into it. Generic design looks untrustworthy to a potential customer or user - not because it's ugly or bad, but because it says to users, "I slapped this together over the weekend - it might not be here tomorrow." That might not be true, but that's the message that is received.
I think you're confusing UX with visual treatment. UX deals with where things are placed on the page, how information is laid out, and the flow of the website. I could feasibly do most of this within the confines of bootstrap.
The visual treatment for bootstrap sites, however, completely lacks any branding. The problem isn't that users can't figure out how to use your site (a UX problem) but that users don't associate the look and feel of your website with your product.
What if the user is put off from seeing another bootstrapped site? They already have a negative connotation before even trying your product/site. That's UX.
How many consumers actually know what a boostrapped site is?
More importantly I would say that a non-trivial amount of users do not enjoy and even detest change. For an anecdote look to any change facebook makes.
One benefit of bootstrap is that casual users can leverage their understanding of how other bootstrap sites behave thus reducing the amount of new things they have to learn and get used to.
Thats probably true. On the one hand you have users getting so used to bootstrap sites that they begin to instinctively know expected behavior and how to navigate other bootstrap sites, which is good UX. Then on the other hand you have a lack of brand, and disinterest because of overuse, which is bad UX. I suppose its a bit of a catch-22.
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'.