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Show HN: Check out our new 'Open Company' page

balancedpayments.com

38 pointsdmdj0311 comments

This page is beautiful, but disorienting. A few issues:

1. The content-free™ pages (single word) are dangerous... I nearly left thinking there was nothing to see. They could instead be bullets on a single page, or an animation. I know you were going for the single-word slide effect, but the user has to actually scroll through 3 entire pages with their hand.

2. The parallax stuff breaks your mental model of a scroll. I have always found this disorienting, despite the fad. Use parallax to animate content slightly (like Apple does), not to emulate a 'wipe' from cinematography, which has no physical interpretation.

3. When you finally get to the bullets with the content, they are very small and feel almost like small type that you're supposed to ignore. I would either present the content front and center as it is or balance it out with the full-page parallax stuff.

4. I just barely noticed the "try the dashboard" link. No doubt many will miss it, or not make it that far. How about hovering it to the right? Or presenting it right away? Or placing the button in multiple locations?

Otherwise, well-executed and very visually pleasing. Good job on that. Likewise, the actual dashboard is pretty, if not a bit trendy.

Sometimes I wonder if designers, like developers who create baroque systems only they understand, make trendy designs so that they will need to be changed in 1-2 years. For a counterexample, think of the OS X GUI introduced in 10.4. Closest to timeless that I can think of.

thanks for the feedback, @msutherl. passed this along to our designer.

Beautiful.

Sidebar: IMO Balanced are doing everything right, and people are noticing more and more. All the open stuff Balanced does is accumulating incredible good will, and we all know that helps with incredible passive customer acquisition, n.b. Twilio. I think we'll look back in a year or two and see that Balanced wrote a new chapter in the book on growth.

Very bullish on these folks.

what he said.

Really appreciate the support!

One of my favorite things about Balanced is that all their communication re: APIs, possible new features, the dashboard... everything is on GitHub.

I've dialogued with each of the founders in one way or another through GH. It's been a completely unique experience and I'm thankful for Balanced and their commitment to building an open company.

Thanks, Taylor. This is for you: http://blog.balancedpayments.com/benefits-open-company-balan...

Thanks for helping make Balanced better

The biggest benefit in my opinion as that every person who implements balanced can "own" a piece of the company. You don't like something, change it. You want to propose a new feature, do it. Being able to directly impact a product you have implemented is a rarity in today's marketplace and it should be encouraged.

Zach, exactly! We think of Balanced as payments by developers. For example: we've got a guy named victor in Taiwan that's completely taken over work on the recurring billing/payouts engine we're building called Billy. Since Billy is completely open-source (just another Balanced API client), he can work on it as he likes. Check it out: https://twitter.com/balancedbilly

It's a great trend going forward to see companies becoming more open about the code they write, it helps get a third party perspective on what you're building. Balanced has done a good job at documenting and keeping their code clean enough that the barrier to contribution is as low as you can ask for on GH.

Gorgeous, the page and the philosophy. The world needs more of this.

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