We have enhanced our new platform, #gandiv5, with a new dashboard that will make the domain name and hosting management easy by letting you see in one central display all information relevant to you and your account.
After adding a search bar that lets you search for each individual Gandi product by name from amongst any number of organizations to which you may have been delegated rights, we have now added a new version of our dashboard that alerts you of pending orders and operations.
Aside from just alerting you, these notifications will allow you to perform the necessary operations in just a few clicks.
The first iteration of the dashboard already displays reminders for email address verification, contextual help when migrating an organization’s products from our legacy interface, invitations received to join a team, and notifications when invitations you send are accepted or rejected.
The next few updates to this interface will also allow you to:
- Receive renewal alerts for products expiring soon, with the possibility to launch a renewal of one or more products from the dashboard
- Renew in one go all the products owned by a single organization
- Monitor your prepaid account, including viewing account balance and approaching expiration dates on saved credit or debit cards for automatic payments
- Validate an incoming transfer or owner change of a domain name
As a central element of our new management interface, we will continue to update and enhance the dashboard and its features. If you have thoughts or comments on it in its present form, we would of course greatly appreciate your input, so feel free to email us at feedback@gandi.net.
Tagged in GandiV5
Dont even think about releasing this “godaddy” style mess. Old system is super great.
Frankly, I don’t see the similarity. Would you mind elaborating? What do you like about the old site that’s not part of the new one?
Andrew:
“What do you like about the old site that’s not part of the new one?”
It is usable.
Andrew, what do you see on the new site that meets any recommendation from the WCAG 2.0 ( https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ ) standard?
Here is /tech/’s opinion about beta site, take it with a grain of salt: https://8ch.net/tech/res/764571.html
Grain of salt taken. That said, there are some useful tidbits in there. I want to address some of the topics discussed by way of differentiating between a few relevant areas of criticism:
1. Design decisions
I’m sure you’re aware you can’t please everyone here and we made decisions based on certain parameters. For example: the old site is virtually unusuable on mobile. That said, we’re not claiming all those decisions were in every case perfect and you can disagree with the choices we made to address that shortfall with the old site, you can even point out the ways it impacts usability for non-mobile applications. But also, ultimately, some people will view any design with a view towards mobile as preferring mobile over desktop.
2. Design flaws
I would categorize the accessbility recommendations here. Also, stuff like text color, navigation issues (for the most part), etc. When they’re truly flaws that don’t spring from design choices, we can fix or otherwise address these.
3. Bugs
Pretty straightforward. If there are things that are broken, we want to fix them. We’re actively looking for these before going into prod, but naturally some slip by.
All of that said, I really want to emphasize that the new site is not complete right now. This is a work in progress. We have a lot of confidence in our customers and community and our hope is and was to get feedback from you all and improve and fix it where necessary. We expect people to have criticisms in all three of the above categories. I’ve sent the most salient points in the post you provided to our dev team, but if you have specific feedback you want to share, we sincerely want you to send it in to feedback@gandi.net.
Are we able to change back ?
This is honestly super awful.
What happend to no BullShit ?! This is clearly Bullshit
No bullshit doesn’t mean we guarantee everyone will always like everything we do. It does means we take your input seriously, though, and own up to our shortcomings.
The new site is a work in progress. The request for feedback is not rhetorical: we actually want your opinion.
That said, I’m interested to know what specific concerns you have about the new dashboard in particular or the new site in general. Would you mind emailing them to feedback@gandi.net?
The new site is “pretty”,
but honestly it’s quite difficult to find some features (ie simple website editing on domains)
additionally there is no more Paypal payment’s method supported which is a serious issue – since I’m not gonna give my credit card number :-/
Hi Gaya,
Thanks for your feedback. We’re adding features by features, and we’re optimizing the ones already available everyday. Regarding PayPal, I’ll check but we don’t want to remove this payment method, except in some countries where it’s been declared illegal. Where are you localized?
Looks ok but, i can not find the “chat” support or anything customer care related. Im pretty sure we can get used to it if we can navigate tru’ it with no issues.
I does looks more clean but for some reason i feel like its design is also to appeal the more “meta” audience and a mobile friendly interface if im not mistaken.
Keep it up.
Thanks! You should definitely expect improvements from here as well. The new site as it stands is still not the final release. The customer care contact page is available in the menu on the left in the customer-facing site (to view the menu in the public site, click the three lines to expand the menu in the top left corner). The chat link isn’t there yet, though.
You’re right that one of the design objectives was to create a mobile-friendly interface (though it was certainly not the only objective). Before v5, our site was completely unusable on mobile and it’s now become a use-case we simply can’t ignore.
To be honest, I really don’t like the beta site. Neither the design, nor the navigation.
Notes on every page:
Yes, you made a “responsive design”, but with that you made a hamburger menu and a huge amount of scrolling and disabled the most useful thing on a small screens: the Zoom feature. In the current state I find it much less mobile friendly than the v4 site.
The hamburger menu open/close button is not fixed. If someone opens the menu and scrolls down the “non-menu” part, the menu can’t be closed.
Talking about mobile-friendly: https://news.gandi.net/ is just an empty page without Javascript.
Notes on Simple Hosting page:
Mobile or not, the https://v4.gandi.net/hosting/simple is one of the best web-hosting page I have seen. But the beta one is terrible.
Do you really want to replace replace
“Estimated monthly pageviews: 300,000”
with
“Usage: websites with little traffic”?
Please do one thing for all the gandi.net users:
just put v4 and v5 side-by-side on a mobile and a laptop screen, then go out and ask random people on the street which one they prefer.
Or here is a better idea:
1) get a stopwatch
2) show them the Gandi.net home page
3) tell them to “Order any Simple Hosting which has SSL”
4) measure the time until they order it. (You are welcome to post the results here.)
Notes on the Domains page:
“Want to see prices for our 700+ extensions? Download prices tld-prices-EUR-A.pdf”
I hope the prices will be available without a pdf reader too.
Thanks for the honesty and specificity in your feedback. As with the other feedback provided in the comments to this post, I’ll send yours to our dev team as well. A couple points for now, though:
Yes, you made a “responsive design”, but with that you made a hamburger menu and a huge amount of scrolling and disabled the most useful thing on a small screens: the Zoom feature.
Your point about the open/close button on the hamburger menu is well-taken. As for the zoom, we set minimum-scale=1 in the viewport meta tag, yes, but not all zoom is disabled (just zoom out). You should still be able to zoom in (just to be clear).
Notes on Simple Hosting page
We could revisit the design to hew more closely to the v4 version. For the wording part though, really the 300k views number is an extrapolation. We don’t restrict or limit by pageviews; instance sizes are more accurately defined by available RAM (from which the page view numbers are extrapolated).
I hope the prices will be available without a pdf reader too.
Yes. This is temporary. A pricing page is in the works.
Andrew wrote:
[quote]The customer care contact page is available in the menu on the left in the customer-facing site.[/quote]
That menu on the left has Contracts, not Contacts.
(Sorry, I can’t find the way to reply on specific post here)
It does have contracts, yes, but the support contact page is labeled “Support”. Sorry if my initial description was confusing.
To be honest, I hate the new interface. The previous version was bad enough. This one is worst.
Suggestion: keep the “Language-Support-Login” links available on the top bar. There is plenty of place for them even on mobile. On very narrow screen you can reflow it to 3 lines.
You may even have it twice (both in the left menu and top-right corner).
But moving it around (above 768px it is top right, below 768px width it moves to the left menu) is pretty annoying for those who resize their windows on desktop.
Thanks for you feedback. As #gandiV5 is a work in progress, we care for comments and suggestions, and we integrate them in our continuous optimization process.
Hello,
Is there a way to go back to the old admin panel?
One of my products, a cloud server, granted a very old, is not listed and I can not for the life of me find it anywhere.
Please advise
Hello, until #gandiV5 is not totally usable (ie. until all the products and features available on our platform are fully functional on the new one), you can use http://v4.gandi.net to find your usual interface.
There’re quite a lot of issues.
The most annoying one is that I can no longer see ALL my domains in a single screen, but I have to switch between accounts to see if some is expiring (I had two, and only one was shown in my first dashboard).
Then there’s LiveDNS. What the hell is it? Why should I use it? Seems like if I switch to LiveDNS I can no longer use v4 interface, but I found no link explaining what’s the difference between the two.
Moreover, about this “split view” between different domains, now apparently I can only use my prepaid account for a limited subset of domains. Is that intended?
Hi Marco,
Domain names are split between organizations, but there is a way to see them all in one place. From the dashboard (the first page that is displayed when you log in), click on the “See all my products link”, and you will see all of them in one list, with filtering options.
About LiveDNS:
The main advantage of LiveDNS is to speed up the delay between your DNS record changes and when they’re really effective for everyone.
If you switch to liveDNS, you will not be able to change your DNS records (or other functionalities that affect them) through the legacy website’s interface, but your domain will still be visible, and you will still be able to use its other features. To edit your DNS records, you will have to use the new website or the LiveDNS API.
You can also use the legacy Gandi DNS from the legacy website’s interface but some of the new V5 features won’t be available anymore.
Finally, regarding your prepaid account, it is linked to one of your organizations, but you can still pay with it to renew all your domains. Go to the product list by clicking on “See all my products” on the dashboard, click “renew” on all the domains you want to renew, and then go to the shopping cart by clicking on the cart icon on the top right hand side of the screen.
In the cart overview, make sure the organization to which your prepaid account is linked is selected in the “Invoice to” section. If not, change it by clicking on the pen icon next to the address.
You will then be able to proceed to payment using your prepaid account.
Hope this helps.
great and all but my old account does not work and I cant find any info on how to migrate it from the old….
on top of that I had to move hell and earth to find a link to the old website…
doesn’t seem like this was really thought through.
Hi,
You can use link http://v4.gandi.net to log in to our legacy interface.
We are here to help, please feel free to contact our customer care team, via this form : http://help.gandi.net or via our live chat here : http://www.gandi.net/support/livechat.
Generic UI rant about mobile-first:
A phone UI needs to be tuned to the needs of the phone user. A desktop UI needs to be tuned to the needs of the desktop user. Trying to give us a one size fits all solution results in one size that fits nobody well. That’s like wanting a consistent interface between my bicycle and an F22 raptor because both are vehicles.
Why don’t you just add a “mobile version” link next to the language selection to query the mobile interface? For example: https://www.gandi.net/?lang=en&ui=mobile
Notes on the home page and the language:
– Your current beta home page shows nothing meaningful besides the search field. It seems you are really focused on getting what domain name I want to buy, which triggers all the uncomfortable suspicions and reminds me to the bad experiences from domain squatters.
– In v4, the “Transfer” and “Renew” under the search bar feels neutral. The “Renew or transfer your domain” feels pushy to me.
– Also, the “Our domain offer” phrase. The word “offer” implies an active action. If you don’t personalize the prices for me, the old “See all domain prices” is a better phrase in my opinion. Or “Domain prices and available TLDs”.
– The search field placeholder “See if a domain is available, or enter keywords to see our suggestions” Instead of telling me what should I do, it would be better if it described what it does: “Domain availability search (you may enter keywords for suggestions)”
For usability, the search placeholder should have example data, and the description should be outside.
Thanks for the feedback. About mobile-first: the operative word you used is tuned. We’re still tuning both the mobile and desktop versions. Which is to say, what you see now isn’t the final version of either.
You raise some good points and your feedback is definitely useful and we’ll be reviewing our options especially for the language questions you point out. Thanks again for taking the time to list out these points.
Fix*: Without user interaction (clicking/scrolling/opening menu) your current beta home page shows nothing meaningful besides the search field.
I like the new style. Modern, easy to find anything. Yes, it’s not that compact as previous – it’s the common disadvantage of all new websites that are trying to be inline with ‘bootstrapizing’ community. But Im sure there will be shift gmail like “compact/airy” switch.
By the way – there is some bug with send icon below – it doesn’t work as button.
Thanks! Appreciate the feedback. And good catch on the Send icon; I’ll report it.
Honestly, the new design and navigation are Terrible! Icons in left menu are terrible, “alya” Amazon? Did You change the site-engine or a web-designer? It seems, that site is on WordPress.
Thanks for the honesty and sorry the new site doesn’t fit your tastes. If you’d like to provide more detailed feedback, we’d really appreciate it, just send an email to feedback@gandi.net. That way we can route your input to our design and development teams. The new v5 site is a work in progress, so we are definitely still open to making changes.
ok I found out why my account didnt migrate.
I always log in 4V without -gandi suffix on my login.
This wont work on V5 unless your account was already migrated!
I don’t actually get most of the hate that’s written down here. I personally enjoy using the new dashboard, it’s performing way better and what I like best is that you chose React, simply because this eliminates all the loading times I had in the old interface.
Keep the great work up, thanks!
Reducing load times was also one of our main objectives, so we’re glad to hear this has helped. Thanks for the feedback and glad that overall you enjoy the new dashboard.
P.S. “Hate” or not anything that can help us improve is welcome.
The new design is definitely more modern, but it feels a little old with all of the 3D effects and gradients. And the recurring “aurora” background is much too Windows Vista.
That is just my aesthetic opinion. Anyways- I’m really impressed when a site a large and useful as Gandi is able to make the switch to a responsive website! Good job on that.
Thanks for your feedback, Alex.
The interface is a work in progress, we’re working everyday on making it sleek and efficient.
Surprised by the negativity, because after years of struggling with the old UI, this is a breath of fresh air to me. Soooo much better.
People are often resistant to change. Others embrace it. Either way, it’s clear that a lot of thought has gone in to this new UI and I expect that once the resistant users have found their way around and gotten used to it, they will prefer it (because it is much better).
Thanks Gandi … (and thanks for the Sieve filters!)
Thanks for your positivity! And stay tuned because there are still a lot of improvements to come!
How do I change a dns setting? EVERY time I do, the terrible interface tells me that “The domain already exists”. And it obviously does, and that is the reason I want to change the configuraiton.
Hi Marco, our customer care is answering to the ticket you opened about this issue via email.
This is horrendous. PLEASE bring back the other website. This looks like “everything else” and that isnt saying much.
Hi Jill.
Our legacy website is still available here: http://v4.gandi.net and will remain until #gandiV5 is fully functional.
As explained, it’s a work in progress, we’re adding features, filters, advanced views on a regular basis, and we strongly believe once the platform is fully functional, it will be much better than the previous one.
In any case, feedback is very welcome. Might you think about something specific you dislike / miss on our new platform, can you please send an email to feedback@gandi.net ?
I’m sorry, but I do tend to agree with the other comments raised here.
I manage 25 domains, and when I log in to v4, I can see all 25 domains on just slighly over one page. This page is an excellent display, showing me all sorts of details about each domain, and allowing me to go straight to an individual domain’s email setting directly.
Compare this to v5. My default dashboard is completely blank. I’m not sure what this is supposed to achieve, but this needs to change before v5 goes live.
So, I click on ‘Show all your products’. This shows me some domains, but after I count them, it turns out that there are only 20 shown. So I then click on Show more and I’m finally back to the 25 domains. I still have to count them manually, the count which is there in v4 hasn’t made it across yet.
The new list is VERY BIG, the list here now spans over 4 pages on my laptop, So the next thing which I’d want is at least the option to have a much more compact view. Having to endlessly scroll just makes things slower.
But, and this is the really important point, the new list is extremely limited compared to the old one. Here’s what is missing:-
1. Detail of which contacts I am on the domain
2. Whether domain is set to auto-renew
3. Whether Gandi or external DNS is in use
4. The DNS servers used for this domain
5. Any SSL certificates in use
6. Mail service in use, and direct link to the mail settings
7. Hosting provider details
In fact, the only thing which is shown is the Expiry Date, and even that is in an odd format, Month Date, Year rather than dd/mm/yyyy as I’d expect to see it. That’s not critical, but I am set to English in the preferences, and that format is not one which English people generally use.
For the moment, I’m very glad that v4.gandi.net is still there, it’s hugely more functional. It doesn’t look as pretty, but that is of very minor concern in comparison to how it works.
I just hope that v5 gains all the of the points listed above before v4 goes away. I’ve seen quite a few other websites lose significant functionality just so they look prettier, let’s hope Gandi doesn’t go that way. Gandi’s been really good in the past, so I am quietly hopeful.
I’m less hopeful about the size, there seems to be a tendency to make websites be mainly white space, resulting in loads of scrolling. Please make sure that all the Gandi developers don’t develop on large screens all the time, I suspect that’s part of the problem. Make them use a standard 1366×768 laptop instead, that’s what a huge proportion of your customers will be using,
Fingers crossed, let’s hope it’s a LOT better when it’s finished. It seems a bit limited to be in Beta already to be honest.
There’s no need to apologize! Your comments are good and your feedback is detailed and we really appreciate that you’re giving us a picture of your specific use case. In recent releases, we’ve already started adding more details to the list of domains you see when you click the “Show all products” link. One thing that’s different, though, that I would like to point out is that you mentioned that the “detail of which contacts I am on the domain” is missing. In the old version of our interface, your account was really closely tied to this concept of domain contacts. In the new site, we’re moving towards a more flexible rights management scheme, so this information (for more information, see #Gandiv5: Organizations and Teams). In any case, if there’s anything you’d like to add to what you’ve already laid out here in the comments, feel free to email feedback@gandi.net. Otherwise, I’ll send this along to our design and development team.
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