Thanks to everyone who participated in the coinholder poll about the NU6.1: Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program. This poll set a new all-time high for coinholder participation. While that is a great milestone, the user experience still has a lot of friction. I have heard from many people who had issues, and I encountered some myself.
I would like to use this thread to collect feedback on the Coin Voting 2.0 mechanism so we can improve it for future rounds. Please share your experience, whether it worked well or you ran into problems, and include as much detail as possible about your setup. This should include your operating system, hardware specifications such as ARM or non ARM and CPU architecture, and whether you compiled the software yourself or used a binary release. The more information you provide, the easier it will be to troubleshoot and improve the voting process.
When you upload your seed and download the blockchain, the voting power shows 0.00. Therefore, the voting power doesn’t update automatically. What we did was click on another tab, return, and it updated, allowing us to see our voting power.
Possibility of answering all questions in a single URL, each election has its own ID, instead of three files that need to be saved on the machine, and process optimization.
Problem with hardware wallets. Imagine a hardware wallet that holds Zcash, but you don’t want to expose your seed to vote on the Zcash Vote App. If you do, you need to move your Zcash to a new wallet, thus losing your hardware wallet and your objective.
Perhaps a solution for hardware wallets could involve implementing a view key or a similar feature. This would work similarly to the connection between Trezor and Exodus, allowing the wallet to read the blockchain and display the amount of Zcash held. This setup would enable users to disconnect from the app and still participate in voting. It offers a safer alternative to entering the seed phrase. Additionally, users can also vote using their T addresses for now.
Hide seed words with *********** after registration on the home page. Messages after each interaction, better UX.
Loading times are high because coin voting is decentralized and your voting app is a node that downloads and checks the votes of others before calculating its voting power. It is pretty much a “wallet of votes” that needs to trial decrypt, compute commitments, proofs, etc.
The vote server is a full node. Basically, we built a blockchain of votes integrated with Zcash. There is a lot of stuff going on and we focused on functionality first.
But clearly, there is room for improvement too. Your feedback is most valuable.
Hi! I took some notes during my voting experience. First an overall voting experience, some problems I found from my perspective and possible solutions. Then also took some notes while using the voting app to capture any issues or impressions about it.
Notes on Zcash voting Voter Experience
Problem: Preparation is cumbersome and generates artificial movement of funds. Solution: focus on tooling to make it possible to vote from shielded wallets so anyone can vote without having to create a separate wallet. Work with wallet teams to improve note management so that they can “freeze” notes so they aren’t spent by mistake and voting power is drawn out fo the voting window.
Problem: Voting feels time consuming, repetitive and boring. For each question voters have to load their seed, pick the question, synchronize, then vote. Solution: Invert the order of those tasks. Load Seed, synchronize, then vote on specific questions. Lower the vote creation time and also provide an experience that lets voters group different questions in a single “ballot” instead of voting on N separate questions. Work out the nuances in the background.
Strengths of the voting app
App UI is simple (maybe too simple)
Multiplatform unified experience
Stable. No crashes occurred during the voting experience
No weird errors popped up during the voting experience
Basic flow tested throughout many voting rounds
Improvement points and specific Issues with Zcash App vote app
App has refreshing problems and inconsistent information requires the voters to switch tabs to see their voting power.
Voting UI is not convenient. On Mac it has a number picker while voting power is in the range of thousands/millions of units.
Total available voting power is not shown on the voting screen. Is like a sending screen that doesn’t show a balance. Should be a an easy fix.
Syncing screen show a status that doesn’t make much sense to voters like “6 out of 14” then voting power is for example 100000 votes.
Screens don’t update properly and are left in outdated or inconsistent states until the users switch tabs.
Users can action voting and delegation UI even without any votes left.