Feedback on alpha.ens.domains

đź’¬ General Discussion
#1

I searched for a thread about feedback but didn’t find one. Feel free to merge this if there’s a better place.

Overall, the new app is taking on a lot, admirable job mapping all this out!

Here’s my feedback from the use cases I mapped out

  1. “I have a name and I want to register it”
    a. Works. Having a fast result is nice in case it’s taken.

  2. “I want help picking a name to register”
    a. The fast search bar is tempting to use for permutations, but ultimately I would want a full recommendations screen like Namecheap’s search results. Doubt ENS wants to get into this.
    b. “Favorites” is kind of part of this use case. It seems less and less useful as ENS matures. If people want to favorite domains to buy in the future, let them go to ENS.Vision or ENS.tools or something. ENS app shouldn’t try to do it all. Drop Favorites?

  3. “I want to look up a profile of someone based on their ENS name”
    a. I type in nick.eth, see nick come up, and click for their /profile. The right column of the /profile is useful to tell me about nick, their accounts, picture, links. This is great, it looks nice, like a big business card. This is the strongest part of this alpha app.
    b. As someone who wants to learn about nick, the left column is irrelevant (expiration, controller, registrant). Seeing their PFP four times provides no value.

  4. “I own one ENS and want to manage it”
    a. “Names” seems better labeled as “Manage” or “Account”.
    b. While managing my own name, I don’t have the same needs as when I’m looking up someone I know like nick.eth. For managing my name, I want to either confirm or edit details on my name, extend reg, send the name, make subdomains, etc. I want to go straight to that mode, which is not the same view as if I were looking up someone else.

  5. “I own multiple ENS and want to manage them”
    There’s a lot of use cases here, I won’t dig in too much.
    a. The coloring on controller/registrant labels: it took me awhile to realize the grey and blue are different. At a glance they look the same. Perhaps just disable the labels instead of greying them out?
    b. As an owner of multiple domains, one of the most useful things of the current app is I can check a bunch of domains and extend them. I don’t see that here, is it being dropped.
    c. Same concerns as above regarding wanting detailed information, not the same as when I’m looking up a stranger’s business card.

  6. Lastly, /profile has a lot of colors. What purpose is the blue bar over profile snippets. What purpose does showing the PFP four times serve.

I’m curious to hear more about the ENS app philosophy. It’s a little like ICANN offering its own registration app, or a TLD offering its own app just for that TLD. Maybe long term the ENS app stays simple or even disappears as third parties take over like Rainbow, Coinbase, ENS Vision.

5 Likes
#2

Love the details/time put into this feedback @ens1
I’ll try to see if the devs have some preferred place for feedback.

For anyone reading, I did want to post the article @taytems wrote about the changes in the new UI, some of the tech/reasoning behind it, and what other changes might be expected.

4 Likes
#3

Hey @ens1 appreciate you taking the time to put this together.

  1. a) great thanks
  2. a) Correct this would be nice to have but is not high priority right now and would probably take a lot of effort to implement well
    b) This is interesting to think about. As this feature is the only one that requires a backend from us to implement well.
  3. For this specific use case this makes sense, but the goal of the profile is to provide the most relevant info at a glance. It’s possible changing the wording to owner/manager might make it seem less like technical information. Showing the profile pic so many times may need a rethink :slight_smile:
  4. a) We have spent more time than you might imagine debating copy. I’ll just say it’s still an active discussion.
    b) From the names view we could add a button that takes you straight to edit mode, we’ll discuss this internally thanks.
  5. b) Not being dropped. The first iteration of the app is focused on highlighting individual profiles. We will be adding features for managing multiple names in the near future.
  6. People will be able to set a special record to use as their banner image, similar to the avatar record. Still finalising the details on that, so for now it just default to a blue bar.

App Philosophy

The primary goal of the manager app is to increase ENS adoption. So this new version is aiming to help onboard the next wave of ENS users who may not be crypto native. A secondary goal is to provide reference implementations of ENS features and other tools to help developers such as the Thorin design system and ensjs, which are both used in the app.

2 Likes