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 :)
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.
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