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Ask HN: Which domain registrar has the best UI?
4 points by rebootthesystem on March 20, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
UI trends towards mobile first, I am afraid, are breaking usability of some services and domain registrars seem to be headed in this direction.

Mobile first generally means one thing: Everything is larger so fingers, rather than mouse-operated cursors, can be used to interact with the site.

Imagine having to interact with a service listing over 200 domains you own. And now everything on that page is "mobile first".

That page sucks. It is virtually unusable. Productivity is terrible and access to information cumbersome. You have to touch indecipherable icons to discover such things as expiration dates and whether or not you have auto-renew enabled. You only see 8 to 10 domains on the screen when you could easily fit fifty or sixty on an equivalently sized Excel spreadsheet.

Rather than having columns with spelled out status elements (again, imagine an Excel sheet you might design to maintain information about your domains) the designers of these UI's choose to make you click (hovering is out on mobile) to see detail.

This is absolutely horrible and a huge step backwards rather than forwards.

So, are there any good and sensible domain registrars who actually understand what customers need by designing management UI's that don't waste our time?

I don't have a problem with the external website being mobile friendly. Once I am inside I want to get shit done. Good design is wonderful and I do appreciate it, but not at the expense of productivity.

EDIT: Developers: Bootstrap isn't the solution to every UI problem!



Not namecheap.

They use the same form for signup and login but show two forms on the page, so if your browser autofills the login form, and you fill out and click submit on the signup form, it uses the user information from the login form to log you in.

And, since it asks for login >after< you have selected checkout, it will then complete your purchase on the wrong login.

I found this out the hard way when I purchased a domain from them, but had my work's credentials stored in my browser: I bought a domain for my wife using my employer's namecheap account.

Of course, their help desk was convinced that there was something wrong with my browser.


I have domains with more than one registrar. One of them is Namecheap. They tried to improve their old UI. Not sure how they went about it but I fear they made it worst at many levels.

Hint to developers: Don't throw Bootstrap (or Bootstrap-like designs) at everything!


It's not pretty, but the UI at internet.bs is so much better than others for edge cases...like bulk transfer of domains.

Namesilo.com is also reasonable.

Both of them avoid the issue that irks me the most...irritating cross-sell and upsell. Looking at you GoDaddy.


name.com


What does their domain management UI look like?

I wish a lot of these companies provided screenshots of their UI's.




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