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Why our website looks like an operating system

posthog.com

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Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#31

Post by keyle »

righthand wrote: post #30
keyle wrote: post #13

It's neat but it runs like a dog. I opened a couple of things and tried to move the window... I'd take a statically generated bunch of webpages over this. If you're going to make one of those multi window webpages looking thing, make it good. To note, in the past, this was a big no-no because SEO was important. You had to have good SEO for search engines to index your content efficiently and show up well ranked in se…

SEO was about documents. Now days everyone wants to make games. How do you rank games?

I think it's about user retention. If people have fun on your website, they'll stick around and they might even read some text!

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#33

Post by Retr0id »

> Legally-required cookie banner

> PostHog.com doesn't use third-party cookies, only a single in-house cookie

You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#34

Post by nine_k »

So, in short, this is because window management under macOS sucks big time (and under Windows, still leaves much to be desired), and because tabs in Chrome become indistinguishable if you open a couple dozen, since they are on top, instead of on the side (Firefox only recently gained an option to put tabs on the side). Watch legacy UI concepts that are so ingrained that people often don't notice how counterproductive they are.

The PostHog interface tries to somehow alleviate that, but still follows the Windows model a bit too faithfully. Also, bookmarking becomes... interesting.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#36

Post by cosmic_cheese »

Twey wrote: post #10
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time Mac user, MDI has always felt like a stopgap to make up for the OS not having the ability to manage windows on a per-application basis (so for example, being able to hide all windows belonging to a particular application or move them all to another desktop/screen). It also feels very foreign on macOS - Photoshop suddenly gained the MDI-type UI in like CS4 or something, after having let windows and pale…

I think that's still a little too restrictive. Sometimes you really do want multiple groups of windows that may belong to the same (think multiple browser windows each with multiple tabs) or different applications (e.g. grouped by task). It's not hard to see how the application marketplace leads to every app doing everything including managing all the things it does, but it's not good for the user.

Custom groupings is a nice feature too, but that feature can live happily alongside app groups. In fact I think the two would compliment each other nicely.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#37

Post by copypaper »

I'm curious how well this will do. Marketing websites are extremely important for first impressions (unless you're Berkshire Hathaway [1]). Although this is impressive and unique, it took me a minute to get over the "learning curve".

Reminds me of Jakob's Law, "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know" [2].

But given your target audience is developers, this might actually do well.

[1] https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ [2] https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#39

Post by BobbyTables2 »

Twey wrote: post #3

I've always thought ‘multi-document interfaces’ as we used to call them are an anti-pattern. I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in? (Mind you on mobile I very much don't have a perfectly good window manager, and indeed can't even open multiple instances of most apps…)

Compared to the experience of something like “Gimp”, I prefer something contained to a single window.

Otherwise two or three such apps running at the same time becomes a game of “where’s my window”. I hate the idea of a toolbar being its own window to be managed.

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