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by gsharma 3994 days ago
Serious question - What part of their UX do you think is game changer? I use DO and Linode. They both look similar to me. DO does have better UX than AWS, but I think DO is comparable to Linode rather than AWS.

On the other hand, I think DO's content guides as a marketing tool is a great asset for them. I haven't seen any other provider do that. Linode had a few guides, but nothing as DO's scale.
2 comments
sbarre 3994 days ago
You said it yourself when you mentioned the marketing and the community and the customer guides. User Experience is not just web interfaces, it's the whole user experience (man....) and that includes onboarding, self-service, support, learning and all the other small touches that make it a satisfying experience to be a DO customer.
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welanes 3993 days ago
Yes. Moved from AWS to DO and it's like night and day. Sample of great UX that spring to mind:

1. No noise on the dashboard and intuitive process flow.

2. Very good forum and documentation. Site:digitalocean.com whatever-your-problem-is and you'll most likely get it resolved.

3. Little features like auto-populating the Gmail MX record values.

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proksoup 3994 days ago
It's a lot of little details.

Just looking at the pricing pages only for a minute, not because I think the pricing page is the differentiator, but because I think the effort in details DO put there is evidenced across the experience: - One green sign up button instead of 8 - One option emphasised more than the others - A toggle to see hourly pricing, instead of small print monthly - 4 stats instead of 6

In general, in DO, I find myself not distracted and finding what I need. Less information to process, the right things emphasized.

Linode has improved greatly from the last time I reviewed it ... but still it seems to be a cargo cult of what DO did as opposed to really understanding the value of those details.

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