

Show HN: Check out our new 'Open Company' page - dmdj03
https://www.balancedpayments.com/open.html

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msutherl
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.

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

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sjtgraham
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.

~~~
ldn_tech_exec1
what he said.

~~~
jareau
Really appreciate the support!

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tbrooks
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.

~~~
jareau
Thanks, Taylor. This is for you: [http://blog.balancedpayments.com/benefits-
open-company-balan...](http://blog.balancedpayments.com/benefits-open-company-
balanced/)

Thanks for helping make Balanced better

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zachgersh
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.

~~~
jareau
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](https://twitter.com/balancedbilly)

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mduvall
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.

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

