The new V5 app is living its early days, and you probably have migrated or are about to do it, and we already have enough hindsight to take a critical look at what has been done, and what still remains to do.
A new UI for new usages
The Gandi V4 admin app, after years of loyal and devoted services, was outdated and not adapted anymore to new usages, new devices, and new users. The app was designed for a very technical audience, familiar with the web technologies and the way they work, putting aside the less experienced users who simply need a domain, a web space or a mailbox for their business, not necessarily related to the web itself.
So that was mainly the deal: design and build an app with easier concepts, more adapted to today’s usages and devices, with a single user account to manage your products.
Build an app with blinders
We focused on the basic usage. We addressed the simple needs first. The dev team learned and used a new front-end framework to build the admin app to meet today’s standards. After months of intensive sprints, time of discouragement and then motivation rebound, we opened the V5 publicly as a beta version and, since last 2017 quarter, as the new default admin interface. We should have feel released and proud of this amount of work. Instead, we realized that we were really far from having reached our goals. By focusing too much on the beginner users, we didn’t address the needs of our core users: the technical and professional ones.
We also failed at delivering a app clear enough to not overburden the support team. They deserve a huge round of applause for the amount of work they have provided for the last months, and that they still continue to do despite the creation of new tickets every day.
This period was a real lesson for every team at Gandi. We learned it the hard way. But we are still focusing on providing the app we really want. An app we can be proud of, that will fulfill all our users needs, in the very best way.
Address the real needs
Since the end of 2017, we are working hard on this list of issues that are expected to be resolved in the very short term:
- the products are not reachable from the dashboard,
- the pagination is annoying,
- the product lists often lacks relevant information,
- each product overview page doesn’t provide key information or shortcuts,
- the organization menu is not visible, you don’t really know as a user that you only see the products of this organization,
- the bulk actions are missing,
- there is no filter on searches,
- the documentation is incomplete,
- the dashboard misses interesting information for an efficient work,
- the app doesn’t feel very stable, you often fall on bugs or errors,
- the app lacks clarity and conciseness.
All these features missing are also preventing us to open the UI for professional users such as the the Corporate customers and resellers.
In addition to that list, the styling needs to be reviewed to make the app lighter, with a better usage of space, of fonts, of messages. We provide a responsive UI for mobile, but we need to improve the layout to enjoy using the app on wide screens too. The navigation behaviour also requires to be enhanced for a better readability, so that you can feel comfortable by using our app.
The good news is all these topics are already on tracks, being designed, developed or tested, to be released in the coming weeks.
We will provide more detail in a next blogpost how we addressed these topics. Feel free to give us your thoughts, reach us on Twitter @gandibar or send us an email to feedback@gandi.net, we will be very happy to read you!
I’m convinced you’ll reach and surpass your goal and ambitions, and until that time, I’m forever thankful that you make the previous interface available in parallel.
Thanks for your encouragements, “Long time user” ! 🙂
Gandi is one of the most bigoted companies I have ever dealt with and this new website proves it. How about Gandi follow up with the folks who have reported problems with the v5 website? Is Gandi seriously going to say that their website is not accessible and not be concerned? Thank you for the continued bigotry fro your company. Even this Comment form is horrible with the font color nearly matching the background color. (You’re going to have to excuse all of the typos I’ve made since I can;t see what I’m typing.)
You talk about learning but when someone takes the time to try and educate you about the real issues some of us face, you just ignore it.
As an aside, please fix your email form so it recognizes a plus email address. This is required under RFC 822 and its follow ups.
Hi Mike, Lise, from UI/UX team, just answered your email. Feel free to share your thoughts with our team on feedback@gandi.net, we need them (and we read them, even if sometimes we don’t reply immediately).
Thanks !
I haven’t been able to reset my password at all since the new rollout. Please fix asap.
Did you open a ticket about this issue so our customer care team can help?
I’m happy to see these are getting addressed.
Do you have a demo account for those who didn’t switch to v5 yet?
Hi! No demo account. I’ll check with Product team if this would be possible.
thank you for your explanation. Sometimes I forget there are real people behind a company trying to solve problems and do their best. I am still confused by your site but I appreciate what you are trying to do. I mostly just want to be able to use my email easily when I sign in from another computer, and have always had difficulty doing that with gandi. This mostly comes up when my own computer is down, as it is now. Sometimes I get frustrated with having to constantly learn new websites and systems . it eats up a lot of my time, especially when they don’t work because companies prefer to avoid helping customers because it takes time for them too. Too many systems are not intuitive to non-advanced users. I have been using computers for many years, but I still would not consider myself advanced.
Non-intuitive is your key point here.
For example:
What do you expect when your visit https://news.gandi.net/en/ ? The news. But instead you are presented with some articles in non-chronological order. And you can only reach the older ones if you “Search” for them (and know what to search for).
This kind of non-intuitiveness is hard, even for expert users.
Thanks for the feedback. As you might expect, “intuitive” is often subjective. In the specific case you’re talking about, the display of articles, we’re aiming to make the news site more easily naviguable by favoring relevance over choronology. On the old site, which displayed everything chronologically, you’d often have to scroll through a page or more of articles about TLD promos that you’re not interested in before you get to the content you’re looking for because they were chronologically more recent.
Thanks Jeanette. Sorry the site is still confusing and I definitely understand what you’re talking about. Learning a new system every few years can be frustrating. With this new site we’re really trying to make things more intuitive than the last one. The last one ended up accumulating a number of features added on in an ad hoc fashion and we feel like the new site integrates necessary tools and features better. That said, if you’re used to one way of doing things, switching to another means what made sense before now might not anymore. If you have specific things that are confusing you, though, let us know. Our customer care team, for example, would be happy to help you figure it out.
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