Improve a domain manager
For Gandi – 2021
Gandi is a french domain and hosting provider, offering more than 750 different domain extensions. The company manages more than 2.3 million active domain names, 20 000 hosting customers and more than 100 000 websites.
About Gandi
Gandi aims to definitively close the Gandi V4 platform. To close this version and migrate the latest clients to the new Gandi V5 client platform, some features were still missing. These features are primarily intended for advanced users who are used to manage a large domain portfolios.
To manage technically domain names, our users are using DNS records* and zone file.
Our advanced users – resellers, corporate teams, tech users – were used to manage their DNS records through linked zones in Gandi V4 platform. This feature were missing in Gandi V5.
Context
How to implement “Linked zones” features in Gandi V5 ?
What is a linked zone?
A linked zone is a DNS records template that is applied to several domain names. This shared zone file can be updated which will update all the domain names linked to this zone file.
The problem
Our problem was to provide the same feature for Gandi V5 , while adapting to technical specificities of this version and improving the user experience. We also kept in mind to design a feature allowing a good maintainability. V5 technical specificities are related to organizations and permissions: a user can be part of several organizations and not have the same roles so not have the same permissions in each organization.
This feature is highly critical as it touches the proper functioning of domain name.
*A DNS record is a database record used to map a URL to an IP address. DNS records are stored in DNS servers and work to help users connect their websites to the outside world. When the URL is entered and searched in the browser, that URL is forwarded to the DNS servers and then directed to the specific Web server. This Web server then serves the queried website outlined in the URL or directs the user to an email server that manages the incoming mail.
User goals
Have the linked zone feature in Gandi V5 platform to migrate.
Prepare in advance a DNS zone file.
Business goals
Close Gandi V4 platform.
Increase our advanced user satisfaction meaning less feature asking for this feature.
Improve the Corporate team – which manage key account customer – workflow.
Design challenge
Provide linked zones in Gandi V5 platform
Deal with V5 specificities such as organization, permissions
Deal with bulk action meaning huge amount of information to display.
Design a tool which has a good maintainability.
Improve UX allowing them to prepare in advance a linked zone without deploying it.
Challenges
I designed the feature through research, wireframing, visual design, interaction design, prototyping and cross-team collaboration.
I worked closely with the product owner to identify user needs and adjust project goals as the project evolved and with the front-end and back-end dev teams to understand technical constraints and ensure design quality standards. And as usual, I worked with the design team to share the different decisions, design reviews and also to improve the design system.
Team & Role
Design process
Discovery
We systematically investigate about the users's needs with the Customer Care to learn what problematic have been reported. As soon as it comes to advanced users, we also question Gandi's Corporate team as they use this kind of feature on a regular basis.
Unsurprisingly, we discovered that our users wanted to get back the feature that were in Gandi V4 platform. The important issue was to have a way to be 100% sure of which domains were linked to a zone and to avoid any conflict on DNS records.
Through the research, we realized that our users were preparing their DNS records upstream in an Excel of text file. This discovery led us to offer a way to prepare a zone upstream and to let our user choose when to deploy the zone.
Step 2 is usually to question the technical team to be aware of the constraints and to delimit the impacts on other features. It also helps to properly take into account the impact of pre-existing features on this new feature → e.g. permission system of Gandi V5.
Ideation
First intentions are tested through lo-fi wireframes.
We had severals solutions, that cost more or less dev time.
#1 Create a whole new tool with the possibility to link domain from this tool :
Great for user that have a specific place to deal with their domains and linked zones but extremely expensive in dev ressource and less maintainable
#2 Create a new tool for linked zone creation, edition and deletion and manage the way to link zone to domains from the domain list
User have to do two actions from different places but extremely convenient for dev time and a better maintainability. Also, our advanced user are already doing a lot of action from domain list.
🏆 This solution won as it allowed to not duplicate the domain table, allowing better performance and a shorter development time. The solution remain very much in line with what Gandi offers today in order to create a homogeneous product and known mechanisms.
Kick-off and co-construction meetings allowed us to better organize both MVP scopes and the feature architecture.
Solution
The linked zones tool
It allows to create a zone, to edit a zone, to deploy a zone on linked domains or to delete a zone.
Link a zone to a domain
Link a zone to multiple domains
Bulk management is a requirement for our advanced users.
What happens when a domain is linked?
In order to be 100% certain of the status of a linked zone and to avoid any DNS records conflicts, some domain feature, likely to modify DNS records, must be restricted when a domain is linked to a zone. This restriction allows to maintain the integrity of DNS records and a fortiori of the domain. Thus users cannot change DNS records of a linked domain unless he unlinked it first.
Back Office for Customer Care.
Customer care need to know if the domain is linked to a zone. As a linked domain have restricted features, customer care agent need to be able to explain this restriction or how to cancelled it to our user.
Beta testing
& iteration
The feature has been tested by a dozen willing advanced customer and by Gandi's Corporate Team. We have let our testers 1 month to test the feature, after this delay, we organized a user test with a scenario to check if the feature have been really fully understood and also interview to gather all the remarks, improvement requests.
Our testers welcomed this feature with a great enthusiasm – which was a real satisfaction :)
They also pointed some great improvement to be :
have a filter system on the list of domains – done ✨
Use this filter system to display all linked domain to zone from the linked thanks to a link – done ✨
Being able to merge this feature to the configuration template feature – another advanced feature we designed with the same team. The configuration templates allow you to configure your domain names upon purchase. – design WIP - low prio
Create the configuration template 2.0 integrating the linked zones which will allow advanced users to configure their domain names upon purchase and to manage DNS records in a few clicks.