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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

+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 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.

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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.

I found your opinion to be flawed, IMHO.

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.

> There's a difference between unique style, and unique function

just how many way can you click a button?

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.

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.

You don't care if your app / site leaves an impression? It's not just the user flow, it's also emotional - design is holistic.

For some things I really don't. Think internal tooling and such.

I don't think the OP is really talking about internal tooling, but rather the wider web.

Even internal tooling should be nice to use.

Of course! Which is why Bootstrap is such a godsend for it. It just doesn't need to have an impressive innovative design.

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.

Standards !== Aesthetics.

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