Domainr - blog

Domainr and Design

We recently heard from a Domainr user via email, inquiring about a design technique used to create Domainr's look and feel. If you're curious about that sort of thing, take a look at Randy's writeup:

ydnar.com: CSS Images, Sprites, and iPhone Webkit

IxD FTW

We were surprised (and honored!) to see Domainr mentioned in Eris and Jina’s excellent prezo, Interaction Design for Web Designers:

Eris defines IxD as “the design of behavior,” and Wikipedia describes it as “the discipline of defining the behavior of products and systems with which users interact.” Regarding Domainr, they’re contrasting its UI (hand-crafted by ydnar) with the utterly terrifying GoDaddy homepage. Domainr’s duty—thus its design—is to make finding a domain name as simple, painless, and even fun as possible.

Registrar User Experience

One of the reasons we built Domainr was that we couldn’t easily find good UX in the domain space*. We focused on domain search because it was an immediate need that didn’t seem to have been addressed well elsewhere. Domainr does one thing and (we think) does it well: domain search. It’s like Google’s search engine in that its essential purpose is to help people find what they’re looking for, and get them to it as painlessly as possible.

A bit of background: Randy’s been designing stuff for multiple decades, and Cameron and I have been Cupertino fans since our parents got us Apples and Macs back in the 80s—Apple and Steve have forever carried the design torch for the tech industry. My five years at Google, part of which was under Marissa's tutelage, reinforced the need for good UX beyond any doubt.

Providing registrar services is beyond the scope of our (totally bootstrapped) company, so the best we can do for our users is send them to other registrars. Naturally, we’d like to send them to registrars whose ethics (and user experiences) are in line with ours.

One fantastic example here is 101domain, which provides registration services for over 700 top-level and second-level domains. They do a bunch of things really well, which makes them a good match for Domainr:

• their site is decently designed, and they have a weblog
• they handle IDN domains
• their forms are designed such that Domainr can post directly to their search script
• their landing pages for posted searches flow naturally with what users would be expecting: “I just found the domain I want, so now I’d like to purchase it.”
• when a domain has registration restrictions, they explain them clearly and include an estimated completion time

If you’re a registrar and would like to integrate with Domainr, follow 101domain’s lead and do these things, and do them well. Focus on providing your users an awesome user experience, and definitely get in touch with us!

∗ Eventually we learned of Gandi and iWantMyName, which rock.