Revamping GoDaddy’s Domain Ownership Protection
A $180M product that protected millions of domains, but never showed it. Here's how making protection visible transformed trust, engagement, and revenue.
role
Design Lead
scope
End-to-end · 0→1 features
timeline
11 months · phased
impact
$677K+ annualized revenue
the paradox of protection.
Protection feels invisible… until the day it isn't.
DOP quietly blocked domain hijacking, accidental loss, and email spoofing for ~9 million domains and was an $180M product. But users couldn't see it working. No proof. No activity. Just silence.
When protection is silent, users are unaware of what product does, the cost does not feel justified. 67% of DOP support calls were about unclear value. Users cancelled at renewal not because the product failed them, but because they never knew it was working.
at a glance.
+
x
relative lift in discoverability
1.58% → 12.42% · +1M clicks/yr
+
%
relative conversions at renewal
2.75% → 4.69% · ~43.5K incremental orders/yr
*All numbers from controlled A/B experiments run by GoDaddy's analytics team
the problem.
DOP was silently working. Users just had no idea.
Nobody could find it. Nobody understood it.
🔍 Invisible by design
Worked constantly, never surfaced its work. No proof it existed.
📍Difficult to navigate
Protection activity buried in account-level Tools — not where users looked.
🗣 A language nobody spoke
Technical logs and raw event tables meant nothing to an SMB owner.
💸 Impossible to justify
When you can't see or understand a product, paying for it stops making sense.
the approach.
Four phases.
One compounding thesis.
Each phase built on the last. Perceived value compounds when users can see, understand, and act on their protection.
Surface protection where users already are
Turn confusing copy into clear reassurance
phase 01 · discoverability
Moving protection to
to where users actually are
The Activity Log, DOP's only proof of work was buried under Domain Portfolio → Tools, built for domain investors, invisible to the Small Business Owners. It was relocated it to a dedicated tab on every domain page.
phase 02–03 · comprehension & simplification
From a language nobody spoke
to one anyone could read
Placement solved discoverability. But what users found was still cold, incomplete, written for systems not people. Every state was re-written and the data was restructured entirely.
Zero state: rewriting silence as safety
Same information. Completely different feeling.
Activity Log: from wall of data to digestible bucket
Users could orient themselves in under 10 seconds
phase 04 · expansion
Growing domain protection
New features · New touchpoints · New flows
what I learned.
Decisions that
moved the needle
01
Perception is part of the product
A product that works but feels linvisible will get cancelled. Perceived value isn't a nice-to-have, it's a retention strategy.
02
Structural decisions are design decisions
The best design decision was moving the Activity Log to domain level, which made every expansion of DOP features that followed architecturally possible.
03
Sequence is strategy
Each phase created conditions for the next. The order mattered as much as the work itself.
outcome.
Transformed GoDaddy’s Domain Ownership Protection from an invisible background feature into a visible, trusted part of the domain experience, reinforcing the company’s promise of peace of mind for millions of small-business customers.