I ran some usability tests on 3 nostr clients to get an idea of where new people are struggling. The testing was meant primarily for UI/UX issues. Keep in mind the same of people is small (10) so it may not give us a complete picture.
For each test, I took down notes and counted how many times people pointed out various issues. I then tallied them up to get a general idea of the problem areas:
Terminology issues - 19
UI issues - 15
Discovery issues - 12
Key issues - 12
Perception issues - 8
Lack of content - 5
Didnât read - 4
Possible major bug - 3
Terminology refers to people who indicated being confused about some of the nostr terms. Among most confusing things were: Keys, relays, Nostr address, nostr, lightning address.
Except for one occasion, everyone was universally lost on those terms and did not have enough information to understand them. People didnât even know what nostr is (understandably so given that the clients are not named nostr).
UI issues is a broad category of various UI problem areas. My summarized findings point out all of the issues users faced while trying the apps.
Perception issues is my way of defining how people are perceiving the apps. Most people compared them to Twitter. But some have attributed other things like âfor trading bitcoinâ or âfor gamblingâ among other assigned purposes. Whether thatâs an actual problem or not is up to developers to decide, but if you want your apps to appeal to everyone, thatâs something to think about.
Discovery issues are where people couldnât find what they were tasked with - for example finding interesting notes or people.
Key issues encompass a range of problems people ran into such as not knowing if their keys are saved, or how to recover them, or what they mean in the first place. One person logged in with their npub without write permissions and couldnât do any other tasks, showing a lot of frustration in the process.
Lack of content is just thatâŚ
Didnât read - means they skipped whatever screen was there just to sign up quickly. Most people did not read, though one did. This is important because we need to think about how to make things easy to understand without much reading.
There were a bunch of bugs which could fall under UI issues, but on 3 occasions there were major bugs where the user could not do anything to advance forward. This underscores the importance of testing clients on various operating systems and browser configurations.â¨â¨The current test findings are in a Google sheet, and Iâm happy to share with any developer whoâd like to see them. For testersâ privacy reasons I will not share a public link here. DM me if youâd like a link.
