Why our website looks like an operating system

Posted by bnc319 2 days ago

Why our website looks like an operating system(posthog.com)

667 points | 476 commentspage 7

jabwd 1 day ago|

While cute, that cookie banner isn't actually required if you aren't doing any tracking. This is the common misconception a lot of people have with the cookie banners -- its not required, it is a confession from a website.

iiyama 1 day ago|

Surely they have consulted a layer before putting words "legally required" on their from page, right?

pnathan 1 day ago||

The critique of modern websites is on point.

Yet, I'm not convinced that Windows 95 is the right vibe.

But it's better than many others. There's a lot of damage done by the GUI & design 'experts' who keep up with the 'good looking things' that change routinely.

davedx 1 day ago||

I love PostHog. The feature set, the listening to the community, the positioning and pricing, and then things like this where they're truly creative about their user interface design.

I honestly can't think of anything I don't like. I'm a very happy user.

ochrist 1 day ago||

Why can't I use my keyboard (e.g. spacebar) to scroll on you website? Apparently I have to use a mouse all the time, and that's annoying. Most OS's have accessibility options (even a lot of websites do this).

nayuki 1 day ago|

I agree with this complaint. The first thing I noticed about the page - other than the excessive and unnecessary UI - is that even when focused on the page interior text, hitting Up/Down/Space/Shift+Space/PgUp/PgDn does not scroll the interior page content at all. This is how I read most articles, and it is massively disrespectful for their website to disable the keyboard-based movement that I'm used to by default.

kamranjon 1 day ago||

Gotta love the employees feet pics folder found in the trash bin: https://posthog.com/feet-pics

ponyous 1 day ago||

I wonder if they already ran the A/B tests or are they still running it. If they did and this proves to be more successful than what they had before, then it changes a lot how I think about website design.

Gualdrapo 1 day ago||

Things like this makes me think that controls for stuff like content density (line height, text width...), per-page dark mode, "scroll to top" and cookie banners should be a task of the web browser/user agent, not of each website.

mbirth 1 day ago||

This reminds me of those virtual desktops/virtual “PC”s that popped up like 10-15 years ago. Which were very similar and had some basic tools for writing notes, calculator, managing files, etc. - all with web technologies.

repeekad 1 day ago||

If you tap an item in the merch store on mobile there’s no indication it’s loading, and then over a second later finally loads, but at least it looks good? Ugh

seemaze 1 day ago|

This is almost as bad as hijacking the back button. It ruins the mental model of branching provided for by actual browser tabs.

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