Post in Joining a Group and Registering an Account Using the Web

2010 Feb 02 06:54 UTC

I have had an opportunity to tweak registration using the Web:
 • The order of the pages has changed,
 • The Set Password page has been simplified,
 • There is a new progress indicator,
 • The wording has been tweaked, and
 • There has been some reworking of the code.
This is the first change to registration in almost 18 months!

The order of the pages that are seen during registration has changed. The Set
Password page has now moved to before the Change Profile; the new page order is
now
 1. Enter email
 2. Set password
 3. Change profile
 4. Verify email
This makes it very unlikely that the new member will be left without a password
set. In turn, this makes it easier to get the new member back to completing his
or her registration if, for some reason, registration was abandoned. I need to
work on the initial sign-up page to help new members get back on track more
easily — resolving an issue we have had since the registration system was
designed in [Michael checks the topic] 2007.

The set password page has been simplified, by changing the Password entry to
show plain text, rather than a series of dots. This allows the new member to
know what he or she has typed, so the Repeat Password field can be dropped. I
muted the idea in 2009 September
<http://groupserver.org/r/post/333ThiwHcQyPpUxf429WVo/>; for the last couple of
months Alice and I have trialled it with the registration process of a big
client of OnlineGroups.Net. It has worked very well, so I am shipping it as
part of the main GroupServer code.

As shown in the image below, registration has a new progress indicator. This
will hopefully give the new member some idea of how many tasks are required
before registration is complete. This idea was also trialled with the Big
Client, and it is working well. However, the Big Client got a progress
indicator that had a graphical progress bar. To make a progress bar for every
skin would be very time consuming, so I opted for the simpler bullet-point
progress indicator, which sits in the spot normally taken up by the
context-navigation menu. (My argument is that the progress indicator is showing
you your context, even if you cannot navigate with it.) With this new progress
indicator, the current task is bold and has a triangle-bullet
  *‣* *Like* *this*
Completed tasks are indicated by a tick-mark
  ✓ Like this
Finally, tasks that need to be done have no indication.

I have reworked the wording on the pages. For the most part it has involved
adding some bold text, and saying “thanks” more. I have also tried to make the
wording less formal, while still being precise and clear.

Finally, and least importantly, the code has been reworked so all the
registration pages are in their own module "gs.profile.signup". Previously the
code was mixed up with the main profile code for GroupServer,
"Products.GSProfile", which is huge. I split the code out in an attempt to
preserve my sanity.

A huge thanks to Alice and Dan, who have supported the trial of the new
registration code, and dealt with a lot of the support load. Also thanks to the
Big Client for allowing us to use your members to test out the ideas. Finally,
thanks to members themselves for the excellent descriptions of the problems
that occurred.

Next up for me is testing, because I could have broken all sorts of things
without knowing it. I hope to have the new code deployed on OnlineGroups.Net by
next Tuesday.