[ryandrake]

It doesn't give me much confidence in the company's seriousness about quality. When I see these kinds of things in applications, my mind starts thinking, "OK, I wonder what else they half-assed?" Does the main functionality really work? If they can't even notice problems that you can literally see with your eyes, what important invisible things are broken, too? Should I really fork over hard-earned money for the premium version if they can't even get basic shit right?

[watwut]

I dunno. I found out that people who do care about how things look like, tend not to care about how they work and whether they are practical. And the other way round too. The slightly misaligned button is not "basic shit". It is useless shit.

And this works on company level too. The groups that spend a lot of time caring about visuals tend not to give a damm about much else.

[GuB-42]

I can see the difference between practical design and bad design. A misaligned button is usually the latter.

Those who just want the thing to work without much regard for the looks of it will tend to use whatever default their UI package comes with, with minimal styling, if at all. It is often not bad in terms of correctness. Defaults may not look great, but they are usually well designed and consistent.

If you have alignment problems, it is often because you tried to do something to the looks, but did it poorly.

[watwut]

I did not mean it as in difference between "practical design and bad design". I do agree there is usually tension between the two.

Simply, people who care about function wont notice misaligned button. And people who are notice misaligned button usually prioritize visual stuff over everything. That extends to managers and whole companies.

Pretty much no UI package will have everything aligned out of the box, it is not even possible. When you use them out of the box without tweaking, you either get misaligned things.