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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

#411

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

remix2000 wrote: post #409

What is this company actually selling anyway? Their about me page reads: We're here to help product engineers build successful products Literally every piece of SaaS that a product engineer needs. This includes tools for building products, talking to customers, and making sense of all your customer data. PostHog is a single platform for people who build things. This is literally just a verbose way to say "we're a com…

> What is this company actually selling anyway?

Even with normal web designs this is frequently my question as well. It's always a bunch of business speak about solutions and enabling. So I think that question has less to do with the website design and more to do with their choice of messaging. "We’re building every tool for product engineers to build successful products." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#412

Post by fny »

Very fun! Some constructive feedback: the mobile experience is painful. Lots of real estate gets eaten up, and a lot of content ends up being hidden.

Also you broke the back button.

Finally, it's not intuitive where to click to get started.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#413

Post by coliveira »

hliyan wrote: post #149

Why 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…

This only goes to show how badly designed are most websites. They're almost created like you don't have a computer, needing to resign yourself to paper-look-alike technologies with just a little bit of annoying effects that don't add anything to the experience.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#414

Post by o11c »

em-bee wrote: post #55
o11c wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The continuity benefit is much less than it used to be, now that we have systemd with `enable-linger` so we can make proper daemons.

that's not what tmux provides continuity for. the continuity is for interactive sessions. on my server i have more than 20 tmux windows, each one for one specific purpose. they have been running for several years.

My point is that a lot of hysterical-raisin interactive sessions really don't need to be.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#415

Post by switchbak »

james_impliu wrote: post #248
hliyan wrote: post #149

Why 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 can remember a discussion with Cory (who built this with Eli, the front end eng) on the topic of "why do all websites consist of a collection of long scroll-y pages / is that appropriate for our business?" and we concluded it wasn't optimal. at the time, we were trying to figure out how to add more products in without it becoming messy, and we concluded we're trying to do a lot more than just what would work well f…

“as a project, it looked fun” - if that’s the rationale, I think it’s fine. The rest of it feels like a post-hoc rationalization though.

I’m not a super fan of this, and I kind of hated windows 3.x, so I might not be the target market. But I also hate many of the trends in modern website design, so maybe I’m just an old crank.

There could be a subset of this that is accessible, compatible, and doesn’t reinvent a browser in a browser. I might end up liking that better than the status quo - so I appreciate the experimental spirit!

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#416

Post by rglover »

remix2000 wrote: post #409

What is this company actually selling anyway? Their about me page reads: We're here to help product engineers build successful products Literally every piece of SaaS that a product engineer needs. This includes tools for building products, talking to customers, and making sense of all your customer data. PostHog is a single platform for people who build things. This is literally just a verbose way to say "we're a com…

They sell error tracking, log observation, etc. Basic devops tools. Think similar to Sentry or LogRocket.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#418

Post by lucideer »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #408
lucideer wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making the WWW worse You can argue that the law might not have improved things (at least not as much as intended), but nothing about this law has made the WWW worse. If you believe that, you've fallen for the concerted efforts of the advertising industry spreading misinformation about who's idea the annoying consent popups were & (like this website) perpetuating the myth that they're a legal requirement. None of th…

The objetive, observable outcome is that before the law, websites don't have cookie banners. Since the law passed, they do. And they make the user lose time, and make navigation much more cumbersome, sometimes even impossible (not even 5 minutes ago, I had to go back on my phone because a newspaper article went into an endless loop after accepting the cookie banner). It doesn't matter much what happened behind the sc…

The EU law is good for consumers & bad for advertising companies. In response to this, advertising companies have made the web a significantly worse user experience.

You can reasonably argue that if the EU had not taken action to reduce advertising companies' ability to abuse customer rights, then advertising companies would not have retaliated, & therefore the web would be a less annoying experience. You cannot reasonably argue though that this is some isolated one-sided situation where ad companies are devoid of culpability.

Your entire comment essentially amounts to ignoring an elephant in the room to sell a narrative that one "side" bears 100% of responsibility for the outcome.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#419

Post by iiyama »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #405
pta2002 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, old photoshop versions (CS3?) also used multiple windows, so if I were to take a guess that’s where Gimp got it from.

"palette" windows were common in a lot of creative applications for a really long time. it seems like with larger screens and higher resolutions, that's a lot less common by default than it used to be.

They indeed feel way less of a pain than dealing with an app with complicated UI stuffed into a single window on a screen with half the size the app was designed for. Even with the site we're discussing here, once I cranked scaling to 200% it became noticeable harder to read than a regular webpage with some text on it would with the same scaling.

However, I believe there is a better way to approach this: put each significant piece of functionality into a separate window or even executable, and use regular moveable toolbars and well-known hotkeys inside each window. One window for code editor (with working Ctrl+Tab and Window -> Tile Horizontally menu), another for configuration, yet another for terminal and output window (with a Pin on top button). When I write code I don't normally need configuration tool, but if I need it even so often it gets opened alongside the editor and is now one Alt+Tab away, not taking any screen space at all.

I used an engineering tool suite written with this approach and it was much better experience than the single-window monstrosity that came as a replacement, stuffing entirety of functionality into a single app and breaking (not implementing) a lot of small conveniences like aforementioned Ctrl+Tab.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#420

Post by ninetyninenine »

arghwhat wrote: post #357

Oh 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…

Why don’t you read why they did that. Instead you responded with your own reasoning without countering or responding to there reasoning. I actually agree with you but the article has actual points that you didn’t bother to read or reference.

Like this:

Frankly for a site like this efficient use of space and multi tasking isn’t as important for a front page. A front page needs to be optimized to be in your face to understand what posthog is in as little time as possible then give you optional pathways to dig in for more detail. A website that’s like an OS is too busy, it’s optimized for productivity and I still have no idea what posthog does exactly.

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