Why our website looks like an operating system

Summary

I have a problem with many large, technical websites.Often times, I’ll want to refer to different pages at the same time. So I’ll CMD + click “a couple times” while browsing around and before I know it, I have 12 new tabs open – all indistinguishable from each other because they share the same favicon.PostHog.com has the same problem – especially as the site has grown from supporting a handful of paid products to over a dozen.As I looked for ways to solve this explosion of pages, I started to question many of the typical patterns that marketing & docs websites have today.Long-form scrolling. Oversized footers. Absurd whitespace.These website encourage scrolling, but just to get people to the bottom of the page? And then what?Why are we doing this? What if we just made better ways to consume content?That’s the idea behind the new PostHog.com. You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please. If anything there's a whitespace deficiency, and your fingers will be jealous you're not scrolling with them as much (because you're so engaged with our content).It has window snapping, keyboard shortcuts, and a bookmark app. It works as well as you’d expect an operating system to work in a browser.You can be reading the latest newsletter from Product for Engineers while watching a demo video in the corner and also playing Hedgehog Mode, the game.I’ll be the first to admit it – an OS interface for a “website” is initially a jarring experience. I felt this as I built it. The human brain expects certain patterns within the confines of a browser viewport, and when it doesn’t get that assurance, it revolts.But the more I used the new site, the more I started to like it. And the experience was the same for colleagues. And now I can’t imagine using anything else.I had a lot of fun in building it with Eli Kinsey. Throughout the site you’ll find:It was also an interesting learning curve for me in figuring out how to organize five years worth of co...