[Anaminus]

This one amuses me. You skip the long-windedness of the front page to look at the pictures. Your eyes are caught by two example user interfaces: contact forms. The one on the left looks great. The one on the right looks awful. Yet it's the one on the left that has the big red X next to it. So you backtrack to read why they're wrong. The reason is because borders "feel" busy and cluttered. Nothing empirical. No data to back it up. Just "feelings".

This led me to believe the whole website/book is going to be like this, so I haven't read any further. I'm sure it's great.

[boloust]

> The one on the left looks great. The one on the right looks awful.

This is also just a mere assertion of "feelings", with nothing empirical and no data to back it up.

As long as those are the rules we're playing by, I'll say that to me, the design on the left screams "designed by a dev", in the pejorative sense, while the one on the right looks like it had a designer involved.

Whether there are actual usability improvements is an orthogonal issue, but I don't feel there's a huge gap between the two.

I feel a lot of this comes down to trends, rather than actual usability. Keeping up with the latest trends in UI design is a signal that you care enough about design and UX to employ and empower a designer/ design team.

Paradoxically, sometimes signalling you care about design might involve making the UX worse (relative to what the user base is trained on), if that's what the trends dictate. For example, the sudden overcompensated reaction against skeumorphism that was "flat design".

Just some of my feelings.