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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 for a 1 product company (we have very extensive content for example) - we feel quite multidimensional. thus a flatter design was proving hard to do. we wanted something that could enable us to offer a very wide variety of things (like 10+ products, handbook, job board, newsletter etc)

a lot of existing websites are trying to convey what they do in <3 seconds, and all of the internet is going for that. our company doesn't fit into 3 seconds, or if it does it's annoyingly vague "a whole bunch of devtools"...! so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do better. it will mean _some_ people bounce and that's ok, because those that stick will (sometimes!) love it.

as a project, it looked fun and we knew it'd stand out a lot as a way to justify it. it's much nicer and more cost effective for us to ship something 10/10 cool than go down the outbound-y sales route. we run at a 3 month cac payback period if you're into startup stats. the proviso is that only works if you go _really_ deep, so that your work actually stands out.

This sounds like an expensive solution to a marketing problem re. the product. And if one digs even further, perhaps an issue with your product line - the benefits of it aren't immediately presentable in a simplified way to the extent it is differentiated relative to the competitors.

Changing the product line to fit the marketing narrative sounds like putting the cart before the horse.

That is not what I said. But youre a CTO, so Im not surprised. Stick to your lane of expertise perhaps.

> so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do bette

Meh, currently doing just that. Trying to figure out what posthog is about, try to store some keywords in my brain if I ever need to return this product in future where it fits and just try to enjoy the site :) And I'm one of the folks that try to determine in seconds/minute whether this is worth digging in or not and whether I understand the offering.

Currently I enjoy the site alot. Not sure if that is the OS thing about it or just the way that information is presented and layout.

Yes - it's a very enjoyable experience!

“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!

> the speed and ease with which I can find what I want (as a potential customer) using that top navigation menu is superior to anything I've seen done so far.

The menu bar is one of the most effective and proved UI pattern. Unfortunately, on Linux we have an entire desktop environment that ditched the menu bar for hamburger menus, which are one of the most ineffective UI pattern.

I would be more cautious in generalizing this feeling. To me that interface feels daunting and cognitively taxing, compared to a CLI or command palette.

I am trying to re-imagine the site as a beautiful CLI.

If anybody could do it, I expects its Posthog.

This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.

I write a lot of code myself and am usually against indiscriminate use of JS (so much so that I now recommend old fashioned server side templates over SPAs unless there is a good reason). But for this comment, I was donning my other hat: that of an executive with whom the decision to adopt (and pay for) a product usually rests. The bulk of a SaaS company's marketing budget goes to attracting and retaining the attention of such people, and ultimately getting them to pay. I feel this site does a good job of that without wasting my time.

Part of it is that so many sites are JS heavy in a way which brings basically nothing to the table.. it's just JS for JS' sake, and sometimes a static web site would work just as well for the user.

Perhaps the amount of JavaScript used in a website is not a contributing factor into how usable a person finds it /s.

Honestly, you don't judge a back-end by how much code it's built with or what platform it's hosted on. I don't get the obsession people have with JavaScript used on websites. Websites with terrible UX often abuse JavaScript yes, but correlation != causation.

It’s because they can see it.

They can go in the inspector and see “oh wow so many MBs of JS”, but they can’t see the backend.

There is a good point to that: this data that is downloaded is an end user resource. Over a mobile network etc it’ll matter. But the days where it mattered at home/office are long, long gone, at least for the audience of the websites that adopt this strategy.

The obsession I believe is a remnant of these old days. There was a transitionary period still a decade ago (when hn was already not that young) where users would spend time loading a website, then complain about the amount of js on the page and how that is unnecessary. The connections got upgraded but nothing strikes down a habit…

More like they can see it but also can't see it. There's megabytes of JS loaded just to show me a crappy glorified PDF that doesn't even work properly. A page I could have literally made using only HTML and CSS and it would be better, but somehow you've made it take 11mb of JavaScript code and it doesn't even work properly. That's the kind of website I scoff at.

I have no issues at all with this website. It's awesome. I mean it's a bit slow but that's probably because it's on the front page on HN right now - yet it still works pretty well. The design is delightful. Incredibly well done. One of the coolest websites I've seen. Who cares how much JS it takes, it's obviously worth it.

I think it depends. I basically see the web as two parts, "web documents" (usually called "websites") and "web apps" (usually just called apps), and it makes sense that web apps that require lots of interactivity (think drag and drop) would use lots of JavaScript, I don't people have a problem with image editors or map viewers being made more simple by the use of JS for example.

The friction occurs when people building a website for web documents think they should be building a web app, so you end up with a scaffolding that requires heavy JS just to serve what essentially is just text + maybe one or two images. The additional JS doesn't really save the user any time or pain, it just makes everything larger and harder to consume.

You are jumping from a discussion about UI design to one about technology and implementation.

By "you", do you mean the typical commenters on HN? Because I would agree. So many assume that because JavaScript is used, therefore there is a bad/overcomplicated UI. But any technology can be used to create crap.

> the speed and ease with which I can find what I want (as a potential customer) using that top navigation menu is superior to anything I've seen done so far.

The web catches up to the past again. :-) Despite all the modern attempts at simplified "delightful" interfaces, a well-structured menu bar is hard to beat.

Pet peeve of mine: Huge headers on webpages that is sticky for no reason (looking at you, ACM Digital Library)

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.

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.

If I recall right, they have most everything in the same CMS, in particular their discussion/help forum is integrated into their main site. To me, that's what the difference is, having done similar work in the past. They have a unified and singular control over the content on their front page. It's not a dozen groups obviously jockeying for control of who gets to be higher on the page or featured more prominently, or just a portal for taking you to subdomains of each department. I don't think you can build a website like this if you don't have that CMS behind it unifying everything together, and I don't you can have a CMS like that unless you insist on it very deliberately organizationally, as the tendency in every org is towards sprawling feudal estates ruled by vp's.

Yes. That reminds me of another thing: no landing pages for each level of menu. If I go to Docs > Surveys, I can skip the overview and go directly to Features > Conditional questions. I dont' need to load an entire page with a giant banner of people smiling, and a call to action button that wants me to contact them before I have read through the functionality.

if, by way of totally random example, each feature team within each department measures how much revenue and how many customers come because of a specific feature that team is working on and responsibly, and that feature team's pm is compensated based on these metrics, then naturally each team will want to bloat the landing space on the front page areas as much as possible. very hard to make something that presents as cohesively as this when incentives of those involved are in competition with one another.

Agreed. Conway's Law. Every time I ever fought that law, the law won.

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.

>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

Very little here that isn't explained by age-old HCI concepts on design.

>And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile

Nope. You see the "X" stands for experience. And nothing ever betrays it's own name. You're just a computer nerd that nerds too hard to get it. You've probably even used a terminal without bellyaching for the next few days. What could you know about what normies want? *cough*

I don't think Don Norman would like this at all based on his rules for good web design. (someone should ask him fhough)

The top level comment is confusing marketing success with UI/UX success: it tickles their brain because they're the target audience. To everyone else this is weird and overwhelming if you're looking for something and suddenly run into it.

Might still be fun/whimsical if you're not looking for something and just stumble upon it, or get shown that

> As I said, there is something here beyond just aesthetics. And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile.

It's almost like, "marketing", itself, as a concept, is user hostile. Most sites' purpose isn't to be efficient, or informative. It's to give the impression that they are "making a statement" (we matter because XYZ), while looking dependable and professional enough to compel calling sales for more.

Commercial transparency goes against that goal (why would I call if I have all the price details I need?). Technical transparency goes against that goal (why would I call if I can tell precisely how this compares to market leaders and competitors?).

So, in many (mostly despicable) aspects, this site is terrible. Unfortunately.

Is this satire?