Explorer Design Explorations/Brief

[reefoh]

Brief

Explorer Brief v1.pdf

Highlights

Categorized Search Suggestions

Surface useful data corresponding to results

Categorize Transactions for easier legibility

Personalize Landing

More to come!

[frol]

I am amazed by the grounding work that has been done! 🚀

Here are my answers to the questions:

Can we consolidate Wallet & Explorer?

I have never thought in that direction. To me, those are two different services (like Gmail [personal] vs Google Search [public and read-only])

Who do we know uses Explorer?

• Developers (community and various NEAR teams)
• NEAR Finance team
• Community (confirm that certain transactions has happen/transferred certain value and land on certain account; view balances)
• Some of the validators (just confirming that their nodes are online)
• Illia watches the network stats

Who do we think uses it?

• Anyone who gets familiar with the blockchain (judging the liveliness of the network)
• Developers (to debug contracts)
• Validators (to monitor the stake of their pool and other pools)

Who else do we want using it?

• Delegators (to decide which staking pool they should choose)
• Regular users (to explore new applications)

How are we collecting feedback?

• Various chats (Discord, Telegram groups, Slack)
• Github issues

Do we have metrics in mind?

We have not started using them yet, but we track the usage and we can extract some patterns

Are we validating through these metrics?

Not yet

Do we have goals for the year, quarter?

They are mostly about bringing new features, but they are not backed by metrics.

Does the new user need an explorer?

I don't believe so. However, it is currently one of the only tools that provide a sense of the fact that something is happening. It is like in the early days of the Internet, we needed those indicators that the connections are fine, but these days only tech people care about the connectivity and traffic questions.

Do we need onboarding?

Can you elaborate more on this? My take on building applications is that they should be self-descriptive, so any user can learn the thing through interaction with it (so far I cannot say we greatly succeeded with that in Explorer, but the small doc pages next to almost every term on every page at least provides some link up to the topics)

If so, where?

N/A

Search history?

Search and navigation through history are the core features that we definitely need to focus on.

Saved searches for return users?

That might be useful, indeed

What do we anticipate the Explorer’s evolution to look like? Short and long term?

It started as a low-level view of the data, and it should also provide more high-level views (NFT, FT, and other application-level flows could be better represented on Explorer)

Do we have a point of view on the hierarchy and priority of the data displayed?

We definitely have some hierarchy of the data flowing in the NEAR Protocol (blocks comprise chunks, chunks are containers for transactions and receipts, and transactions/receipts get executed to apply some changes to the data and produce outcomes)

Should we offer personalization?

At the moment, I cannot think of any but the search history

Is there ever a need to socialize transactions or data for sharing?

What do you mean by "socialize"? People do share links to individual transactions and accounts these days

Do users ever need to save or favorite or pin things?

Maybe some of the accounts can be personally pinned, but users can use browser feature to keep bookmarks, I believe.

Do we want to add any further personalization of the wallet or Explorer UX?

I will need to think more about personalization. I would not say it is a core feature for Explorer.

... (I will answer the rest of the questions tomorrow)

[frol]

Staking? Onboarding for Staking? Personalization for Staking?

(I assume you refer to delegation. It is unfortunate clash of NEAR Protocol staking with the process that Wallet calls "staking", which in fact is delegation of tokens to the staking pools / validators)

Explorer is not the right tool to perform staking itself, but it can definitely educate people about the process (why it matters and how it works, and present the current state)

What’s a validator?

This term is also overloaded.

Validator [1] is a person that operates nearcore node (neard) that is involved in the validation process. (Usage in a context: "We need to communicate this hotfix to validators ASAP")
Validator [2] is a nearcore software (neard) running on a server. (Usage in a context: "Validator is offline" or "Validator does not produce blocks")

Validation process is the process of producing new blocks in the network according to NEAR Protocol specification.

Does Venmo model make sense here (adoption or familiarity)?

I am not familiar with that.

Square cash?

I am not familiar with that.

Can we humanize the data? 2,000 transactions per second. 5th among chains.

I find it is quite interesting and catchy, but I cannot tell what problem that would actually solve.

Customizable? Drag and drop or around

I don't think it makes sense at this stage.

Notifications for errors or success outside of explorer

Explorer is too low-level to make the judgement on whether it makes sense to notify about certain transactions. Wallet might be a more appropriate place for balance change notification. Also, it could be a completely separate service (e.g. Telegram bot, e.g. learn more about tipbot).

Should we consider the explorer as canonical?

Yes, I believe so.

NFT explorers

Ideally, we want to support all the standards right in Explorer. We explore the ways to bring NFT and FT support to Explorer.

Can we ask for the last 4 of the transition or hash? Like SS #s?

I am not sure what you refer to, but if you mean if we can search by substring of a transaction hash, then yes we can, though I feel like first characters are easier to lookup (as a human) or at least that is what git thought me (they use first 7 characters of the hash on display).

Can we filter by day/month/year/hour/minute/Clock time

We can!

What visualizations matter? At each level? How do they help users complete a task or understand something in a meaningful way?

Given that Explorer represents tons of data, I believe we need accents and visual identificators for users. Currently, I fear that some users might be lost unable to get the primary information and filter out secondary details.

Navigation through the history with filters is where we can improve significantly.

Onboarding for staking: Help me Navigate….I know the way

I am not sure if this is even a question.

The process is quite involved, but Wallet had simplified the technical side of it, though it does not give any context as to why that thing even exists. The original and still referenced low-level documentation is available here (see "How to Use and Earn Rewards with the NEAR Token" section on the https://near.org/tokens/). There are also some third-party takes on it:

• https://medium.com/cryptium/how-to-delegate-near-tokens-through-the-command-line-5055fd73561c
• https://figment.io/resources/near-staking-delegation-guide/

[heycorwin]

@reefoh Let's go ahead and break the components of the brief out into the focused issues we went over yesterday just so we can track the different output more easily and have discussions that are scoped a bit tighter

[reefoh]

@frol Love the feedback and enthusiasm! I'm formally organizing things with Corwin's guidance and will nudge you when its complete. Look forward to collaborating man!

[shelegdmitriy]

I'm not sure is it the right place for it but I should leave this task here #817. The point is we have some issue with some transactions which is not so easy to resolve but that issue will outdated after new design