camerondaigle

This gives the user the impression that their phone is reading their text messages, which feels invasive.

Cameron here, designer for The Informant. We've just launched as a Heroku addon and are looking for feedback, insights & whatever you can throw at us.

What it is: The Informant is usability testing in the form of error tracking. It simply watches ActiveRecord validations and tracks when errors are triggered. It's a great way to learn where users are making mistakes, so you can improve the usability of those areas.

For example, maybe you're getting abandonment rates on account creation or checkout. The Informant will tell you if users are simply mistyping their phone number a lot, and the fix might be as simple as a copy edit or more forgiving backend logic.

tl;dr your users make mistakes all the time. Now you can learn where and why, and fix it. :)

Fair enough. This seems like CSS Positioning 201 to me, but I've been dealing with this stuff for a long time now, so my perspective is probably pretty skewed.

I completely agree with your point re: cognitive processing: good CSS communicates intent to the reader, so if this kind of stuff is unclear to people and the Smashing Mag post helps the concept click in readers' minds, then it's a win :)

Good grief, if the element to be centered has a fixed height and width, then there's nothing to this. I've been using the negative margin method for years:

http://jsfiddle.net/mBBJM/2155/

Not that it's any less Stockholm-Syndrome-y than the linked article's solution, but still, I have no clue why this is on the front page of HN.

Designer here. The specific downsides addressed in the article, IMHO, can be a problem of process, not tools. On my projects (I work at Hashrocket, RoR shop) we put clients through an initial look & feel phase to nail down general palette & styles, and move forward with PSDs that are approved prior to HAML/SASS slicing and actual implementation.

However, we always (always always) treat the PSD step not as Final Design, but as a high-fidelity communication tool - the next step after our wireframes (which are as un-designed as possible) and story cards. When requirements change, we loop back as far as necessary; for small changes, new stories and in-view UI adjustments suffice; for more fundamental changes we'll go back to the PSD.

Don't get me wrong - being able to maintain design quality in the face of change is one of the most difficult aspects of being a designer on an agile team (and getting design involved in the entire delivery process is absolutely essential) but the tool you use to build initial design isn't necessarily going to solve that challenge for you.

Personally I find it healthy to be able to concept layout & UI without making stylesheet & DOM structure assumptions. Designing via code, for me, blurs my focus - when I'm making decisions in Photoshop, I'm aware of the CSS that will be required to replicate it, but I'm not having to actively execute on them. Designing and coding take very different parts of the brain for me, if that makes any sense. Try drawing a picture while listening to a podcast vs. reading a book while listening to a podcast.

> “When it comes to products, user experience trumps pretty pictures. It’s not easy for most designers to do, because you have to rebel against everything you’ve been taught as a designer: fight the pretty pictures, fight the urge to tweak your drop shadows or find the perfect border-radius.”

This is more than a little patronizing. Delivering a polished, professional design and being flexible to changing requirements aren't mutually exclusive goals.

Credit to my coworker Shane Riley for making this joke last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4640843

I posit that taste is a skill. There's no reason why someone might be able to work to become better at understanding, distilling, and working with known stylistic & cultural touchstones.

Of course, the meaning of "taste" in general is also ripe for a huge argument about semantics between folks with some free time on their hands.

FWIW, I tell most developers I know to not stress out about their personal blog design and just focus on the value of content. The vast majority of default/built-in blog layouts are just fine. You're not a designer, you're not seeking to show off your design chops with a custom layout – just write good articles.

That said, this particular sort of design where it's not a standard blog theme and not a custom design, but is just tweaked Bootstrap just seems neither here nor there.

(To clarify my own statements: I'm not saying there's never a time to use a highly accessible datepicker, just that a very common use case for a datepicker is just to provide a visual way to quickly input a single date into a form control.)

This picker seems nice. I'm bookmarking it for any case where a complex datepicker is necessary.

For people looking for keyboard / accessibility support, I personally don't think a datepicker should be attempting to handle those concerns; it's more of a UI polish layer than a primary input method.

On that note, if you're looking for something significantly more lightweight (~8k minified) and easily skinnable, you could check out my own jQuery.minical:

http://jquery-minical.heroku.com/

As a designer that works primarily with Rails devs on large-scale applications, I feel the pain of developers that need UI/UX/application designers and can't find/afford them (for personal projects, startups, etc).

Bootstrap fills that very interesting and apparent need in the web community. It feels like a coping mechanism for devs who can't find good design/frontend resources, so I don't have a personal need for it, but I hesitate to dismiss it entirely as I personally know many developers that wouldn't have anywhere to turn without a tool like Bootstrap.

That said, the author's attempt to push it forth as some sort of a framework for all web language is a bit much. The best UI and UX will always be at the service of what the specific website requires, not skinned out of a modular system.

But this knowledge/resource gap is a growing problem, and I don't see enough of the design community becoming aware of it and stepping up their game to make things like Bootstrap less necessary.

As a designer, I am impressed with how graciously Collazo handled the situation, and disappointed that he had to go to such lengths to satisfy Barry.

I'm hoping that the inherent bluntness of Twitter exaggerated Barry's response; the poster being sold was a different layout & typeface, not a "straight ripoff".

I'm not saying Barry doesn't have a case, just that if I were in his shoes I wouldn't have reacted in the same way in the least. He's reinforcing a stereotype of designers that I'm not particularly proud of.