I've noticed some discussion about this here. I think it's important we think about the best way for new user signup to work. Here's how the process works right now on Davis Wiki:
Someone clicks 'new user'
They're taken to the wikispot.org hub to create an account:
I think the "take them to the hub" step is generally kind of confusing. Yes. No doubt they are thinking, what's a wikspot hub? I just want to join this wiki. But let's ignore that for now.
So we ask for "Your real name, written WithoutSpacesLikeThis," password (twice) and email address. Email and password aren't really confusing. I think the "Your real name, written WithoutSpacesLikeThis" step is confusing.
The intent is good, though — get people to use their real names on the wiki. But this format — using the person's real name as their user name / log-in name — was not a design decision anyone made, it was just something we were stuck with.
People are generally very used to the "username or email address to log in" metaphor — every site on the net uses it. We ask people to use their real names in an unusual format to log in. So it's pretty likely that the information someone needs to remember to log into Davis Wiki is different than most other sites, leading a lot of people to forget their login name and habitually use the lost password recovery process to log in. Based on the volume of emails I see about lost passwords, this is a problem.
It seems like there are some goals any change should strive for:
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Keeping identity on the forefront of the editing experience.
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Making it easier for people to remember how to log in.
Here's some ideas I can think of:
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Use email address as the mechanism to log in. Ask people for their name during sign up / editing their profile. Show their name on Recent Changes, etc. This makes logging in super easy (email address!), but makes "how do we identify this user" difficult. After all, people could choose the same name on signup (unless we didn't let them, but that might be weird). And we might not want to expose email addresses in any form, so displaying that in a URL, etc would be lame.
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Ask for a username, but also ask for their name. Display both, depending on the circumstance. There's no reason why someone can't use PhilipNeustrom as their username, so everything stays generally the same there. When displaying differences or looking at history we could also display someone's full name. So this would work just like now, except we'd ask for — Username, Email, Password, Your name.
I'm leaning toward #2 here. Thoughts about this?
I would also lean towards #2, for the reasons given. I suspect there might be places where you could only display the username because of space constraints, and places where you had the room to display both username and full name. But I think that would be OK. The "user page" would of course have both. (I can definitely see the motivation here — it's a real pain when a site uses an unusual login). —CovertProfessor
Next up, after they fill out the new user form:
We throw them to the user settings form, again at wikispot.org. I think, at the very least, someone should appear back on the page they were viewing before they signed up. But what else could we do at this point?
We could maybe:
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Bring them back to the page they were viewing, but show a dialog welcoming them to the wiki. The dialog could contain links to different welcome pages / help pages and have standard links at the bottom of the dialog to create a user page and edit their user settings.
I think this is a good idea. People come to the wiki with all sorts of misconceptions that might be avoided if they'd read the welcome pages (or, RTFM, as we said in the old days). Unfortunately, even if you flashed READ ME in big read letters, many still wouldn't. But it's worth a shot. Linking to the welcome pages, that is, not the big red flashing READ ME. —CovertProfessor
