Your example is too specific in terms of context. Add-ons in WoW are usually minimal in design, out of the way and not attract attention to itself (besides the info it is displaying). Unless your default skin has blinking lights, rainbow colors, detracting the user from actually gleaming the info the addon is displaying, a user has no reason to mess with it.
Bottomline, UI Addons in WoW are meant to be minimal in design (just look at all the popular unit frames, action bars addons, even yours - all minimal and functional). There's no reason to ever jazz up the UI for WoW - that'd be self defeating.
But Bootstrapping is different - it will depend on the function, which stage of the product is at and purpose of the site. Each scenario is different.
I agree that they're different in that website design is very much about building a brand, but a WoW UI is possibly even more in need of good design than a website, because its sole purpose is to provide a tremendous stream of realtime information to the player in a way that will let them manage it all and respond to it quickly. There's much more information to manage, and everyone will want it managed differently, so it seems to reason that people would want to take a tool with flexibility and use that flexibility to mold the display to their preferences. That was certainly my expectation when I was writing it.
The reality was that for whatever reason, people don't - and the default is big and garish, and doesn't fit with their UI at all, and somehow it remains unchanged.
My experience as an author and player is that most addons are not "minimal"; they're often plain, which is not anywhere near to the same thing. My most popular addons (tens of millions of downloads worth!) were also the ones that provided the broadest range of visual customizability, and I've seen a huge range of visual configurations for them. On top of that, SexyMap is definitely the least "minimal" out of the bunch (in terms of skin; it actually makes the UX much more minimal over the default minimap), so I'd expect it to be the most commonly customized, but it practically never is, to the point that "Oh look, a screenshot with a default SexyMap in it" has become a joke among my friends.
When I say minimal, I mean minimal in terms of look/clutterness. Not minimal in terms of function.
Your addon (from screenshot on Curse) is extremely minimal. It just have a map - that's it. It doesn't mean it doesn't have any more fuctions/tweaks. Compared to default UI, where you have strokes on top of strokes, you have those other minimal circles that live around the map, you have all these options. Your addon essentially removed those from the map UI (or hide them till user wants them/turns them on), hence minimalism. You have different skins, but they don't take away from the function of your addon. It's minimalism is constant. Hope that's not making it more confusing.
Thinking more about this, instead of having the players be compared to Twitter Bootstrap users, you (the add on developer) are the bootstrap user. You have all these options to use Blizzard's default UI and color, but you didn't. You made your own :)
> Add-ons in WoW are usually minimal in design. There's no reason to ever jazz up the UI for WoW - that'd be self defeating.
I'd disagree, even the defaults of a lot of the custom UI add-ons were overdone and I had to scale them back. The majority of the people making add-ons aren't designers themselves, so the outcome of their efforts is going to be based on their experience or needs, not necessarily on the idea that UI should be minimal.
Additionally a good portion of these add-ons were made specifically to be very visible and add functionality that was either hidden or not available in the game. Screenshots from some of the top raiding guild members were overwhelmed with buttons, notifications, etc. because if your macro is good and communication is consistent, you just need to focus on these more intentionally-prominent add-ons.
You're saying the exact same thing I am. I mean minimal as in non fluff stuff ie: the gargoyles Blizzard has around their Actions Bars.
Also a reason why WoW Custom UI Addons is a perfect example, because the developers aren't designers, that's why most of them are minimal in aesthetics. So without trying, they're minimizing the visual aspect and focusing on the function already.
Bartender is a good example - tons of customization and tweaks but it's minimal in design. It's just buttons. No fancy background, borders, colors. Just purely the icons.
Perhaps we downloaded different add-ons or I just never found the right one. I had to uninstall quite a few because I was specifically looking for the ability to do clean and simple and instead got really loud and annoying without the depth in customization needed to fix it. Those that did offer the ability to truly extend the interface made it way too tedious to do so. It got to the point where I was trying to find a dev on Curse to help me create better options before ultimately deciding that I didn't want to be tied to supporting something on a game I was already putting too much time into.
Bottomline, UI Addons in WoW are meant to be minimal in design (just look at all the popular unit frames, action bars addons, even yours - all minimal and functional). There's no reason to ever jazz up the UI for WoW - that'd be self defeating.
But Bootstrapping is different - it will depend on the function, which stage of the product is at and purpose of the site. Each scenario is different.