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Comment by homebrewer | Hacker News Reader

And for some reason you're describing it as it's a bad thing. I don't care much for tailwind, but bootstrap is still used for intranet applications, and is an excellent pick in that category. Why waste time writing CSS, reimplementing what has been done millions of times before you, when working on an application where function has strict precedence over form? I'd rather listen to users who fill hundreds of forms daily, understand where they struggle, and spend effort on optimizing their workflow than on pointless eye candy.

(In my experience, it's never been "this doesn't look as good as the latest version of Discord", or whatever.)

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Muzak isn't what most people choose to listen to. I'm not bemoaning the use/existence of the tool, I'm bemoaning what it did to the internet and taste making. We accept boring competence in web design like we accept weird outlet placement in our homes. The signal it sends is that it doesn't matter and as a result many in this thread (and web users in general) believe it. We've been bemoaning the death of the internet lately. AI gets a lot of displaced credit for this, but the Internet died because we stopped bringing creativity. Not just in look and feel, but in content, business ideas etc. In many cases we let walled gardens limit our ability to be creative for convenience (Facebook pages vs VPS hosting for example). The internet stopped being for consumers and started being for businesses. Developers get easy frameworks/platforms so that businesses get a low price point and the customer gets what they get (as though this wasn't to serve them to begin with). If they pay for it, it must be good, right? Why do something new?

I like predictable UI even if it's a little "boring" because given the choice between utility and style, I'll choose utility every time. It is possible to make stylish things that also have very high utility, but it's a lot harder than favoring one, and I will always favor utility.

Take the author's example in this article - he calls out two things more than anything - a single sentence "pitchy" description of the product, and plan cards that look and feel extremely samey from site to site. I'd argue that both of these "downsides" are an upside for me as a consumer:

- Having a one sentence quick summary of what a product does allows me to make a quick decision about whether I'm interested in reading more about this product.

- Consistent plan cards lets me leverage my shared understanding of how plan cards work to instantly answer questions like what the monthly / annual pricing is like, what tiers are available, etc, that a bespoke presentation would require me to think about.

If I come to a landing page for a product, I'm more interested in answering questions like "is this a product I would like" and "how much does it cost" than appreciating the design of a page.

I would personally like a little more consistency and a little less creativity in my UIs, TBH. Most UIs should be boring and effectively invisible, because if I'm paying attention to the UI, it's a distraction from the task or content that I actually care about. The web and electron have hastened a trend which I intensely dislike of every single application looking and acting completely differently for what is fundamentally the same thing. It's not that this variation doesn't matter: it's actively bad. (Not that UI design doesn't matter. Good UI design is important. But part of what makes UI design good is consistency and that's what web designers seem to actively dislike)

(more precisely, I long for the days of a standard and customizable UI toolkit. I should be the one who can adjust what the UI looks like, not hundreds of different designers with different concepts of how to 'stand out')

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