Gotta love the employees feet pics folder found in the trash bin:
https://posthog.com/feet-pics
Why our website looks like an operating system
371–380 of 504 posts
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#372I think that might be my favorite website. I love it, so much content.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#373Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…
While I visually like the design, what's so innovative about a menu?
That observation seems wild to me as well. He just described every nav menu.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#374I'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.
Im not sure gimp being constrained to a single window would constitute a multi-document interface.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#375Nice idea, awesome implementation, but please no. I now need to learn a new UI and UX, I have to to organize windows inside my windows. I want websites to be more like a block of text rather than a super fancy interface.
It adds a ton of overhead in general. Perhaps there is a subset of the website that could be a single page app or apps. But the entire website? yuck.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#376Oh god. It has a pleasant color scheme, but this is an awful idea. By trying to recreate windows and bookmarks in the web app you're at best just implementing redundant features and getting in the way of the native browser features by trying to showcase yours, at worst breaking regular web usage entirely. Take their right click menu for items to select whether you want an in-app tab or real browser tab. Congrats, you…
It is fun and I like it
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#377Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…
I think it’s the other end of the consumer web vs power user design spectrum.
Using an OS requires familiarity and cognitive effort. Tapping oversized buttons… less so.
There’s been a long trend (definitely as far back as the first iPhone release, maybe further) of every product release adding more white space, bigger elements, and overall reducing information density.
If your target is consumer web, the “don’t make me think” approach is probably still correct. But anyone who’s ever looked at a Bloomberg terminal knows there are still times when you designing for the lowest common denominator is the wrong play.
A company with a large suite of technical-ish products might be a place to experiment with alternative paradigms. That said, I poked at the site for a few minutes, then had to ask an LLM what PostHog actually does.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#378Absolute failure of UI/UX.
This is another hint that if your startup does something well the frontend barely matters.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then website operators will just find another method to fingerprint users Example: The identifier you get when you pass anti-bot challenges (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc).
That's not a cookie?
It probably is, currently. But even if cookies are not used, the identifier for this type of functionality would still need to be stored somewhere and passed to the server in some way to avoid showing another CAPTCHA to the user.
Whatever mechanism they choose to uniquely identify you, they will insist it's necessary for another purpose and they totally are not piggybacking on it for tracking (e.g. for the CAPTCHA example, they would insist it's absolutely necessary to protect themselves from DDoS).
As another example, they can always respond with HTML where all links themselves are an opaque hash that internally contain "route + your id" when decrypted. Then emphasizing that all links are always different even for same routes to "show they are randomly generated", and saying that they do this because... idk, detecting scraping or something random but plausible-sounding. Or whatever sneaky variation of the `?PHPSESSID=` query param from old times.
(Yeah I know the last example doesn't a lot make sense, I didn't think too hard about it, the point is that they will probably find a way somehow.)
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, yeah, it doesn't fit all applications and web browsers are a case where MDI doesn't really work. The linked site is more of a gimmick, at least as far as the documents go. But my response was about calling MDI an anti-pattern in general. Just because it doesn't fit all cases, it doesn't mean it is an anti-pattern.
Oh no I get that the in-site MDI is a funny stylistic choice, and I've no problem with it. But the thing it's poking fun at is in-browser MDI, hence the comment. I stand by the anti-pattern comment. I think there are very, very few cases where ‘MDI’ is appropriate, and I put it in quotes because the things being managed in that case are almost never ‘documents’ in any meaningful sense (rather they're some kind of gra…
Well, i already mentioned an example: image editors. IMO image editing is one of the perfect cases for MDI because not only you can have multiple images visible at the same time, but also multiple views of the same image (useful for pixel art, for example). Most MDI applications allow you to dock and/or float stuff in the edges/over the windows which is useful to avoid repeating the same chrome at every window (which is what a lot of applications that support multiple documents with toplevel windows do).
In theory you can have multiple toplevel windows with separate windows for the control stuff (tool window, tool options, panels, etc like GIMP has) but in that case you really need a virtual desktop dedicated to the application itself. Personally i prefer to dedicate virtual desktops to tasks (i have a fixed number of virtual desktops and their shortcut keys have become muscle memory over the years), so e.g. anything graphical goes into the same virtual desktop, but -say- GIMP in multiwindow mode feels awkward to use alongside Blender. Krita having an MDI mode is much better IMO, even if Qt's MDI support is primitive at best.