BTCminstrel on Nostr: Okay Alby i'm going to try this in two parts. First I'm going to try and walk through ...

Okay Alby (npub1get…0nfm) i'm going to try this in two parts. First I'm going to try and walk through my UX when I first encountered Alby. I'll lay out the JTBD I was trying to accomplish and map out my mental state.

Then I will actually RESEARCH Alby and try to better understand what you do. Then filter that back through a suggested UX (or some changes) that might better support the beginners experience.

Obviously this is just me. I'm just a humble minstrel. Not necessarily representative of a specific wider community. Mileage may vary. Yadda yadda.

PART 1: The Minstrel Tries Out Alby

So I joined nostr maybe 6 months ago? it was before the nostr conference in the Caribbean. Anyway, I read up about nostr. Seemed exciting and cypherpunk af. Just what social media needed. I was in.

Somehow I created my account using Damus maybe?

Then discovered that your nostr keys are similar to your bitcoin keys... never enter them directly anywhere.

Found out about the nos2x extension. Loaded it. Started using it. Felt much safer. But it was really basic and felt kind a clunky. I often had to copy and paste the public key. (1st world problems)

Then people started verifying their identity. Somehow they were getting an email address with their handle @nostr.plebs or something. This was mysterious and confusing to figure out and I didn't have time at all.

And of course I was zapping, which was awesome. But could only do this on mobile, as that's where my lightning wallets lived. Plus I didn't like having to tap like 7 times to complete the zap process (zap, select wallet, select amount, add message, send zap, close window, close another window, now up a level, do the hokey pokey, turn yourself around...)

So at this point I had three vague friction points with my nostr experience: nostr key extension, verifying identity, and smooth zapping.

I honestly don't remember how I found alby. I'm sure it was some post in nostr about how cool it was, new shiny thing, smart and handsome dev team, etc.

But I remember what caught my eye is it seemed like an easier way to verify my nostr identity. Seemed like a sleek UX, and I didn't have to ask some other nostr user to "add me to the list and I'll get the email address" or something, which is how it seemed to work at the time with the other service.

Then I remember the UX looking really great. It felt professional. Which is I guess what I needed at the time, since I was just too busy to be the intrepid early adopter.

As I was going through the verification process (i.e. signing up with alby) I discovered it apparently solved these other problems too, with the public key sign in AND was a client-agnostic lightning wallet with a smooth UX.

At that point it seemed like a reliable 1-stop-shop for a lot of nostr/lightning stuff I wanted an easier way to do.

It's a little fuzzy, but I recall going straight to installing the browser extension and only interacting with Alby through there. it's a pretty large pop-out window that's almost the size of a mobile interface. So it seemed to me like "that's all there is to alby".

And it's mostly worked for me that way this entire time. I remember a couple times looking at the menu and noticing there's some other features that I'm not taking advantage of. But my nostr exprience got noticably smoother after installing it, and I had other priorities than becoming an Alby power user. So I just coasted.

Until this morning (yesterday?) when another #nostrich told me my verification is actually not verified. so down the rabbit hole I go and here I am now writing a fucking novel of a UX narrative, which I hope is at least mildly helpful.

Now I'm going to go do some formal research on Alby and will write up PART 2 later tonight. I'll tag you but will post it as a reply to this note.

Cheers!