Comment by danmostudco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danmostudco | Hacker News Reader

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For what it's worth - I saw the value of Tailwind UI as its connection to the Refactoring UI product from Adam Wathan (tailwind) + Steve Schoger - https://refactoringui.com/ The tips, screencasts, and eventual book they offered gives a superb, distilled, crash course on making stuff "look good" when to the untrained eye it can all seem arbitrary. They take a lot of guess work out of adding polish to your product.

Taking a look at Tailwind UI, it's clear they have baked in all of the tips and tricks into the components offered, adhering to preached principles like good visual hierarchy, layout and spacing, color theory, and typography. Therefore, while TailwindUI may seem like just a bunch of utility classes, the components they have constructed tap into a lot of solid design principles that a large community has bought into and studied. I'll for sure be buying and trying it out in future projects of mine.

Previous discussion on Adam and Steve's book here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655224

Refactoring UI fails to explain WHY or provide evidence (e.g. A/B tests) that show their new designs even work.

Let's take their most recent post for example (Remove Borders): https://twitter.com/steveschoger/status/897849211110273024

The only explanation as to WHY is the before "look[s] really busy." That's quite subjective and unhelpful. There's no testing here, there's no remark on usability/accessibility, no discussion of color-blindness vis-a-vis background color tones, nor real justification for the change anyway.

If you want to create pretty things without worrying about the consequences, they seem like a great resource. But hard to see it as more than a toy resource; professional UI resources do a much better job because they're made for real end users, rather than other developers e.g. UK Digital Project[0], US Digital Project[1].

PS - I'm not saying their designs don't look nice. I'm saying a nice looking UI design isn't a good yardstick for UI. I've created plenty of nice looking UI that users performed worse using.

[0] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

[1] https://designsystem.digital.gov/

Users of public facing systems do not have alternatives. It is quite different for privately held SaaSes.

Ugly UI will absolutely reduce the amount of users and even more so potential sales.

Amazon is “ugly” in a lot of ways... but is wildly successful.

Merely claiming something is true doesn’t really mean much.

+1 on all of this. refactoring ui is an awesome resource for developers who want actionable ways to improve their design skills, was a must-buy for me.

in the same way, tailwind UI has been really useful over the last week since i bought it. some of the integration stuff isn’t ideal - you have to copy-paste huge snippets of code w/ alpine.js code you need to manually remove - but overall i’ve already found it to be useful to help me get unstuck on designing my apps.

i made a little vid on my channel about getting started with tailwind ui if anyone wants to see what it looks like in practice: https://youtu.be/quhvuOTlrwA

(note that since then i’ve added a lot more of the components in this project: my feedback has stayed pretty consistent, and i think some of the copy-paste problems are easily solvable)

Hey Kristian, thanks for your video (from a fellow Tailwind UI purchaser). Super useful.

I encountered Tailwind first, but actually bought their book (and Adam's older stuff) during Black Friday last year.

Mostly, I bought those because of liking Tailwind and liking the podcast, Fullstack Radio.

I'm into design myself, but not so much into designing for SaaS, form layouts and stuff like that. That's why something Refactoring UI or Tailwind UI is interesting, they're designed by people from that space, they're basically selling their design domain knowledge.

Agreed, Adam mentioned many times in his screencasts that his intention for Tailwind UI was to create a source of income to keep working on these projects. I'm happy he went this route rather than a Patreon or starting to charge for content like the screencasts.

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