And yet Facebook, Twitter and Google all have a nearly identical top bar (sorry, Facebook's is blue). They have billions of page views to analyze and have all come to the same conclusion.

> NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same.

It depends on your goal. If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win. If you used Netscape back in the day you can use Chrome today and not have trouble. Consistency itself can be beautiful.

If you're making a marketing site, then your designer can go wild (as long as everything is being tested for effectiveness).

I don't think anyone is complaining about the structural similarities between bootstrap sites. If 50% of the sites out there had fixed top-bar navs and responsive content made of three columns under a hero panel, everyone would win. The question is why everyone has light-black Helvetica Neue text on grey and white backgrounds with blue accents, with aqua-blue gradient pill buttons everywhere.

They are not. It's not just the colors but the visual style. They are different for all three. Conclusion is > have a top bar .. with distinct visual style.

> If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win.

Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

>Consistency itself can be beautiful.

Yes, same with search engines, if you used Google you can use Yahoo. But still their visual design is different in many ways if not search result. You can tell Yahoo from Google but not two Bootstrap sites.

Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

>Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

If you are relying on the style of your buttons to distinguish your site from all the others, perhaps you should be spending more time on building out the content/functionality of your site.

I often find that designers are more worried about how a site will look in a portfolio than whether the end users will get anything out of the site.

Do you get confused when you run native apps on your Mac? Like, you can't recall which app does which because they all use native controls with a standard L & F? If you do, this is a usability concern I've not heard of and would love more research into. Most usability studies focus on how effectively one can perform a task in an app, not how quickly one can recollect which application performs which function for them, so it may just not be well-studied.

VIsual design: I'd be confused if all apps used same icons. Paramount to using that bootstrap topbar with same visual style.

Note: You could change colors / gradients and some visual design aspects and things would be different.

Are you a web designer? Because some folks (yours truly included) don't have great design sense, so putting up a bootstrap site is much better than the alternative 2003 geo-cities look that is just as easy to create. When it comes to the lesser of two evils, i'd choose "less" and bootstrap.

I am a UX designer. Bah let's just call me a designer. Included the "Quick Fix" for people who might not have a great design sense.

Sorry, but do you even remember the days before Bootstrap where developers come to showcase their work? Most of their crap are severely under-styled. Some forms in admin sections don't even have labels because the developers knew what the fields were for, so they never bothered to make it remotely comprehend-able for the rest of the team.

I agree, sites should be styled. Bootstrap makes it amazingly easy for those developers who want to build an MVP. Tweaks are nice, but if you have zero design skills, they may or may not be necessary.

One would be a fool to simply ignore a web project because they were built on Bootstrap. If it's not relevant to your needs, sure, ignore it. If it can help solve your problems, pay attention to the app and don't worry about the design so much. If it makes a ton of money, I'm sure they can re-invest some of that back into making it look better.

To be honest, I'd prefer Amazon to use Bootstrap with a yellow branded bar at the top, ditto Facebook (with FB blue). Ditto for any flight search website. Anything that's an "application". With blogs however, I don't want to see it resembling the default.

To clear few things up lets discuss why Bootstrap is here.

Bootstrap should be taken as a base where from we can start building our applications right away while being real agile cause it provides us with mostly used design patterns and interactions which if we require can differ from in our design iterations (!imp). So again its essentially a framework providing some conventional patterns for development which I presume is bit like convention over configuration paradigm.

I would agree with the point that visual style matters as its is something which will molds into your brand identity and must be unique as all products are unique in one way or other. So yes its really a fail when most of the developers choose to maintain same Visual style in their sites which is to me is an utter disrespect of brand identity and something that must be avoided.

>Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

As far as Usability is concerned to my understanding it is not affected in any way by fact that 2 sites have visually similar buttons but it is rather defined on the basis of content they provide and how it is presented(!imp). Difference between usability and visual appearance is quite understood I guess.

You might want to consider reading this post by Dave Winer "Why Bootstrap might be very important" http://scripting.com/stories/2012/03/07/whyBootstrapMightBeV... and Twitter Devblog - A brief history https://dev.twitter.com/blog/bootstrap-twitter

Bootstrap is not for Amazon or Facebook. We're talking about websites for wrestling events in the UK -- literally one of the sites in the gallery that the author links to -- and other such things that really do not need to present any sort of ground-breaking, or even interesting, visual design.