jamesefhawkins
commented
4 years ago Apologies for the slow feedback. Mini retro - there is a lot going on here, I should have just chunked my thoughts to get some out faster. Previously, I also wouldn't have anticipated you getting this done as I hadn't seen it as a part of your role to design the product this much, so I think I was reticent to put the time into QA'ing this properly due to concerns it'd never be implemented. I should have spoken up!
First impressions
I like the style. The larger graphics and reduced text in the navigation feels simpler and more focussed on the tool's functionality versus wordy-tiered menus that require more mental effort to process.
Palette
Whilst the sidebar feels on brand, the greys used differ and somehow feel a little softer than our typical style:
Could we fit better with the range of colors here? (I'm not convinced the existing palette will suit the app well here, but we could add to this more empathetically)
Fonts
These are different to the website and brand. Is there any reason not to use Gosha Sans for the headers?
If so, I'd push for Helvetica Neue given that's used for smaller headers on the website.
Icons
1 - the plane for retention seems particularly weird 2 - feature flags as a magic wand I think is also a bit weird. 3 - toolbar icon looks a little fussy, but not a big deal at all though
I think overall, the icons are a little bland but are passable - I suspect Lottie could work magic here.
Language
You've switched from 'People' to 'Persons'. I just really appreciated this change even though it's tiny, given that persons is better for a precise set of things.
Functionality
Actions and events and tags
The objective of this redesign is to increase retention by decreasing actions complexity. Here, I feel we have increased complexity by having actions, events AND tags.
- I believe these are the 3 key benefits of actions that we should be pushing: a) allows grouping multiple events (and of different types) with complex queries; b) helps clean and standardize data (fix typos, if the product or data changes, ...); and c) it works retroactively (huge aha moment, from a customer call).
Above is from #1755. I agree strongly with the benefits of actions here and that they're something we must retain, but I think all of these would be achieved through events with tags, as follows:
- allows grouping of multiple events - if multiple events have the same tag, they are grouped
- helps clean and standardize data - tags can achieve this as well as actions
- it works retroactively - if a tag comes from ie clicking on an element, then it would also apply retroactively to achieve this moment
I think this then frees you to call them 'events' which is an industry standard term. I would remove 'Live' from the sidebar and would replace with 'Events', with it as a list like:
Some_event | tag 1, tag 2, tag 3 Some_other_event | tag 2, tag 5
Tags layout
The instructions struck me as 'outsized' compared to the other places we give instructions. ie perhaps a small icon next to the header on every page requiring instructions would be more consistent. The explanation itself I think is good.
I would envisage the content of this page to be a list of all tags being used in practise and some ability to create a new tag which looks like it hasn't be prototyped yet?
Org / profile menu
I think it's a great thing to encourage people to carry one profile with them for a variety of reasons that I don't think are fruitful to debate here. I like the work to make the UX support this. There are a couple of things I'd change:
The user profile has a company 'PostHog, Inc' listed and two organizations. This is so you can switch organizations. I therefore think it makes more sense to have the organization as the "main" thing showing, then the username underneath. If the username is big, as you currently have, with small text as the organization name, it implies the organization is fixed, which it isn't.
I'd additionally add the global email used by the user added under their username.
The profile menu struck me as a little messy, but easy to solve:
- greyed out email above logout can go if you put this under the username
- we have two navigation elements but one as a button 'Organization settings' and one as a link 'Manage billing'. This would make me unclear if billing sits at org level or not (which it should). I'd suggest we remove the billing link entirely and this would sit in the organization's settings page.
lottiecoxon
mariusandra
paolodamico
Twixes
yakkomajuri
EDsCODE
Is your feature request related to a problem?
Through numerous customer interviews we now know there seems to be a bit of an issue with our current navigation, in which a) users find it a bit hard to reach the features they need or b) users are unaware of other features/capabilities of PostHog. This design proposal attempts to tackle that. Also attempting to balance the need to make all features easily discoverable to the problem of having so much stuff that it's overwhelming for new users.
Aside from the above, this design also introduces full support for multiple projects and multiple organizations.
Release plan. As this is a particularly intensive change (from a UX perspective), I'm thinking that we can release in the following manner:
Thank you for your feature request – we love each and every one!