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Posted by bnc319 1 day ago

Why our website looks like an operating system(posthog.com)
664 points | 472 commentspage 4
copypaper 1 day ago|
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/

internetter 1 day ago||
> unless you're Berkshire Hathaway

conversely, Berkshire Hathaway's website gives a great first impression

number6 1 day ago||
I wonder what the ad costs and why it's there in the first place
Klonoar 1 day ago||
I wonder how much, if anything, Geico pays to advertise on that page.
valleyer 1 day ago||
Zero, as Geico is owned by Berkshire.
ebcode 1 day ago||
That'd be great if I could navigate the in-browser browser with my pgup/pgn or arrow keys, but I can't. If you're going to go this route, you really should do comprehensive accessibility testing.
urbandw311er 1 day ago||
On the Posthog dashboard, you can activate a chatbot 'hog' which walks around the screen, but you can control it with WASD, and even jump up onto 'ledges' that correspond with the divs of the page you're on. There's a hidden "party mode" where you can see/chat to your other team members' hogs!
hdb2 1 day ago||
I would give anything to have a linux window manager that looks and behaves just like this. I said this to my coworkers in slack and they said that my age is showing, which is probably true. everything on this website is so easy to find, it just feels good. icons and color scheme is perfect as well.
kevin_thibedeau 1 day ago|
LXDE and Xfce are essentially this.
jedberg 1 day ago||
As a side note, I like how at the bottom it says "legally required cookie banner" which ironically is not required by law. You don't have to have a cookie warning if you only use 1st party cookies for website operations (which is what this looks like).
methyl 1 day ago||
IMO this is nothing more or less than a successful marketing stunt, I suspect once it gets the reach it can get, they will replace it with something less radical.

Very cool growth hack idea and I admire the fact that they were able to pull it off, as crazy as it is.

cramsession 1 day ago||
That's so fun! It brings back the excitement and nostalgia of home computing in the 90s. It's also pretty useful and I buy the justification for why it's helpful.
kldg 23 hours ago||
This is a very neat design; it's quite complicated, but I don't see anything particularly unnecessary. I use DPI scaling, so I was impressed because it's something I tend to have a hassle with in testing frontends which need to be aware of dimensions of objects and calculate where the user's cursor is. The "close all" button in window manager is pretty good.

This will be good to study from, if nothing else for me personally. I appreciate that it's almost wholly unobfuscated.

straydusk 21 hours ago||
I'll tell you what, I was interested in this place, but this would stop me in my tracks. For an A/B testing shop to do this (which I can promise you they did not A/B test), it pretty much invalidates everything they supposedly stand for. This is one of the goofiest, most non-functional things I've ever experienced on the internet. This would be a fun hackathon project... should have stayed there.
mixedbit 1 day ago|
The UX problem with emulating windows within web pages is that if you do it convincingly enough (like this website does), the users will unconsciously use windows shortcuts, like alt+F4 to close the window, which closes the whole browser.
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