Designing good UX is hard.

Especially for developers without design background. Messing with UI was one of my most time consuming activities with little outcome.

Ready-to-use-templates were probably the only solution which didn’t make developer stuck with UI. And there are lots of sites you can get one from.

Those templates aren’t very reusable though(unless all of your project look the same)

I always wanted something more generic and easy to modify.

Solution

To me 960.gs started the era of reusable UI frameworks. The framework enabled to unobtrusively encode layout of your site and that was a huge step forward. And it was so easy to use!

Twitter’s Bootstrap pushed it even further.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.

Which is exactly what I was looking for: generic framework with the very essentials like typography, layout system, good looking element style defaults, basic navigation and more.

There’s another one Skeleton which I’ve not tried yet but it looks very similar to Bootstrap though lighter.

Long term solution

Frameworks give you ability to deliver your ideas quickly. Still, making unique applications that stand out means having solid UX skills.

So I got this Design for hackers book

Hope I’ll bump my UX-fu up.

Also

Apple offers some WWDC videos on UX which is another great source to learn for developers.