Avax wallet needs the following improvements to reduce user anxiety, and improve usability

[dirkdirkdirk]

1. There is an x address and a p address. You can switch between both. However, there is no information about what these are, why they both need to exist, what the differences are, how they can interact, how you can switch between them, when and why you should switch, etc. The wallet should have such information, could be through help icons with tooltips, could be in other way (perhaps add a “Help” tab, perhaps add a first use wizard, I don’t know). Not having this information for something so complicated and confusing INSIDE THE WALLET is a big usability no-no, and will scare off new users. It almost scared me off.

2. There is a lot of confusion regarding the "This is your address to receive funds. Your address will change after every deposit./Derived Avalanche Wallet Address’ section. People are getting confused why the address changes every time, and they don’t know if they can still use the old address. This should be clarified, in the wallet itself. I don’t know how, can be help icon with tooltip, can be in other ways. But I have asked this question many times in Telegram, and keep forgetting the answer. Now a friend is asking the same question to me. This is confusing users, and needs to be clarified, in the wallet itself. Also I see people ask what happened to the old address, they are not aware they can find it in the ‘Manage’ tab. It feels a bit hidden there, as people usually identify their address by their main starting address. I would like to see it accessible in the home tab. Perhaps show the derived address AND the original address, or make the original address accessible by pressing some button near the derived address area or whatever.

Thank you for your consideration.

[avawings]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with you, it could be very confusing for newcomers especially if you are not familiar with how the primary networks on Avalanche are structured.

1. As you probably know by now, the X address is for receiving transactions on the X Chain, whereas P address is for receiving staking rewards. The change when you click the button is only visual, it shows you what your current X or P address is.

2. The old addresses are still valid, I agree this should be mentioned in the wallet. It might make sense to put the “View Old Addresses” button right next to the derived address card like you said.

For the overall Help functionality I think it would be great to have a dedicated Help Center with FAQ and some articles on how the wallet works (maybe video snippets on how to use the wallet). It would be great to have a first timer UI wizard too.

[dirkdirkdirk]

1. Staking rewards will be irrelevant for most newbies and retail users, I am wondering if exposing those users to things like “p” toggles is a good idea. Perhaps the wallet can be split into 2 modes (tabs), Basic and Advanced, where basic is an extremely basic wallet, not showing “p” toggles and other advanced features, and should be the default. Once you have staked or you have tokens in your p wallet, “advanced” becomes the default. I’m not sure if this makes sense in practice though, it needs some designs to try out such ideas.
2. This would be a massive improvement, perhaps alongside some text stating why there are multiple addresses and a text saying that any shown address can be used.

[coinless]

I highly doubt end users will need to be concerned with the p-chain or x-chain in their final experience. It’s probably more valuable for dapp developers to use as a mental model when it comes to design. From Avalanche’s perspective, it secures different types of assets (or isolates them if you will) so that these different assets have the option to be used together to create new financial instruments. The end users though will be barely aware of any interaction since the best dapps abstract these layers away.

[Cegri]

Rather than opening a new topic, I will add my suggestion here;

The wallet is designed to use a new “change-adress” for every transaction. I assume this is to avoid traceability and resonable for default behaviour.

I would suggest to add an advanced, normally collapsed, option for the change adress. (Similar to “reward adress” on the validation pages.)
Perfect solution would be a drop-down list of current adresses. However a text-box would also be acceptable.
A similar option should be available for the target adress on X > P transfers.

Why? This would allow us to keep control of our adresses and check our balances from the Explorer, rather than logging into the wallet every time.

[AngelicBuster]

I am so pleased you’ve said this!

I really am thinking everything you just said over and over again.

I want ONE address (my address) on cold storage where I can store my tokens.

I don’t trust hot wallets, and I want to be able to track my wallet. With Etherium I can track my wallet to send me emails whenever new activity is on. I can also track my wallet on telegram.

If you want people to use Avalanche and their main wallet then it’s super important to make people feel comfortable with it. Allow them to have a phone app where they can see their wallet and possibly have 2FA on it, or allow it to be used on a wireless ledger.

They stated that you can have avalanche on ledger, but I’ve yet to see this. https://prnt.sc/w5qq5i

[avawings]

We are working on improving the whole experience but things take time. I agree with most things said. In order to be able to track wallet accounts on other platforms we are thinking of exposing the public key of every wallet so it can be easily shared and tracked from any source. I think that would be the ideal solution here.

[Cegri]

Thanks, we apperciate the work. (I’ve seen you have exposed the utxos on the staking screens. Well done!)

Please clarify “exposing the public key”. Will you be exposing a key that can be used to calculate all the adresses? If so, though useful for me, it’s not an ideal solution, as we would be exposing all our adresses to other sources. This is jumping from one extreme to the other on the traceability issue.

What’s the reason you don’t want to add the “change adress” option?

[avawings]

I am against the “change address” idea because it would break how the HD wallet operates. What we can do on that note is maybe provide an optional change address input field for transactions, while keeping the current behavior. I guess this is what you sugested after all?

Exposing the public key means showing the owner of the wallet the public key used to derive the wallet’s addresses. This key can later be shared with telegram apps like you mentioned to follow addresses and track wallet activity without giving ownership of the wallet.

[Cegri]

Yes, I suggested an optional input field for transactions. Similar to the Reward Adress on the staking screens.

[bmit]

I had an issue in another thread where a TX got stuck, but the balance appeared removed while the transaction said “success”. Another user guided me to a force update, but to think that the top line balance doesn’t upload ether way though (a stuck tx should either be in one wallet or in another) is going to cause a lot of people stress. This should be a priority fix.

Personally, I think that the idea of having one wallet alone is something that needs improvement. Let alone in-browser mnumonic and PK requests. It’s 2021, we’ve got to be better than this.

[Cegri]

Bmit, let’s clarify your situation for anybody who has not read the other thread. Yours was not “a” regular transaction between two wallets. It was a cross-chain transfer, P > X, in the same wallet. That transfer is actually done in two transactions; one export, one import.

Although there is instructions on that screen to use the forced chain import menu, I agree there is room for much improvement.