I2P Addressbook
UX Review and Summary
One of the most flexible and complex components of the I2P software is something called Addressbook. In its simplest description, it allows an I2P user control over managing sites and services and what they share or keep private from the network.
It is very flexible, and therefore struggles with ambiguous mixed uses, mixed terminology, and misspelling. When reviewing documentation, we found Addressbook, addressbook, and Address Book.
Usability Review
Potential solution:
We considered best ways to present people with the information required to better utilize the address book options for their own use case.
Local Address Book: Depending on whether it’s for “Sites I host” or for “Sites I added manually and wish to share on my I2P Site” this should have the following changes:
- Sites I host: Name change to possessive: “My I2P Sites Address Book” keep configuration file the same. UI Change to interstitial remove “Local Address Book” option from page.
- Sites I added… wish to share: Name change to indicative “Known I2P Sites Address Book” keep configuration file the same. No UI change to interstitial.
Private Address Book: No change.
Router Address Book: Router address book gets most of the addresses it gets from subscriptions, therefore it may be more self-explanatory to call it the “Subscriptions” address book. I also think it should be removed from the jump service interstitial options, although I totally understand if it’s controversial to do so and will back off.
Published Address Book: No change to name required, although “Shared” was bandied about, it has some appeal. It would be nicer for folks if we could add a button which allowed for one-click publishing of the non-private address books to the published address book.
We need to work on a specific way of phrasing it that it translatable, understandable and complete.
To start with: “Private addresses are addresses you only intend to share with a limited number of people. If you choose to share your addresses with others using I2P, private addresses will be exempt”
So many options, how do I understand my choice? My assumptions had to guide me on this one.
We need to use plain language when we can and give people clear examples for how to use the options provided.
In summary, as written by eyedeekay, we find that:
All address books have sort of the same underlying meta-issue with terminology, which is that nobody seems to agree or intuit what the different address books are supposed to be useful for and how to actually use them, and in practice everybody makes their own rules for how to use them.
For example, some people use the “local” address book to store sites that they are hosting on the same computer where the address book resides, whereas other people use the “Local” address book to disambiguate addresses that they added using a jump service from addresses which were added by a subscription. Still others have more sophisticated behaviours, carefully choosing the “Private” and “Local” address book depending on whether they believe the address they are about to visit is going to be something they wish to help others access, or which they prefer to keep secret, but leaving them with no way to disambiguate services they host themselves and services they added with a jump unless they cross-reference it with hidden services manager.
Maybe all of this is “OK,” Address Book is very flexible after all, but it makes it very hard to give advice on how to use the address book and silently forces decisions upon users who do not fully understand what they want to use the address books for going in.
We have started the process of taking on some of the UX and language barriers to better support informed use of the I2P AddressBook. If you would like to contribute to our design team and help us make I2P more useable and better adoption, contact sadie!
