814846 - Subdue registration page on SUMO

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Software, task, P3)

Description

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

I ran a survey on the registration page for the last 3 weeks. Here is the result: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/16fb9b0a-9f7f-4968-a802-526090083212/b844d42a504b3d2693fe351dacd45255

NB: reading through the "other" comments: It's almost all people who want to ask a question. 

Essentially about half of the visitors are on the page by accident, and the other half wants to ask a question. We are talking about 2k uniques per day. That's 1000 people who want to ask a question and are stumped by this site.

Instead of asking them to register so prominently we should point them to the AAQ process. There is just no point in them registering on the site if they don't ask a question (contributors excluded). 

Maybe the solution is to offer only the log-in page in the main menu and have a big banner to the AAQ from that page with log-in subdued and registering even less prominent?

Bram, what's your take?

Comment 1

[Bram Pitoyo [:bram]]

Attachment: Sign in and registration forms merged, with Ask A Question header

I generally agree with the observation that a lot of visitors want to ask a question, and seem to think that they need to be able to register first in order to be able to ask a question.

But on the other hand, the sign in/register page needs to display the form in a prominent way. Deemphasizing the forms too much would only weaken the purpose of this page.

So my solution is threefold:
* Since half of the visitors want to ask a question, we put AAQ as a text link on top
* The position of sign in and registration is switched around, so sign in always appears first, and get read first
* Registration is renamed “Register to be a contributor” to clarify the purpose. In addition to this, there’s an additional link to AAQ below the form title.

Comment 2

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

This is a great way to present the info, very balanced. Thanks, Bram!

Comment 4

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

Since we are merging the two views/templates, there is some refactoring that needs to happen. => 2pt

Comment 5

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

Pull request: https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/pull/990

Comment 6

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

Deployed to master just now.

Comment 7

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Thanks, Mike! I saw your comment on IRC: Yes, we are somewhat misleading with "you don't need to register to <ask a question>", but it's for "the greater good"™. ~90% of the 2000 daily uniques on this page don't need to ask a question, so the more we deflect from registering on *this* page, the better their experience will be. Once they are in the "Ask A Question" process we can handle their question (and registration). It's simply doing no one any good, when normal people sign up on this particular page.

Of course that leaves the questions of whether there is a better way to phrase it, that would on one hand keep people from registering and not be a blatant lie, I mean "misleading" ;) 

Help very much welcome, and we can even a/b test to get to the best phrase!

Comment 8

[Ibai Garcia [:ibai]]

The registration process seems to be broken in this page.

Why is that line needed in any case?

There's an open question to this flow: Users who end up registering (they don't see the banner or they prefer to register first) will complete the process and don't necessarily now how to proceed to ask a question. Maybe we need to customize the registration confirmation page too?

Comment 9

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

The registration form has been fixed, which was bug 820331.

Comment 10

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Ibai, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Can you explain?

I had a survey on this page, almost half of the users are on the page by mistake, the other half is on the page, because they want to ask a question. The assumption is that they actually want to ask a question, but didn't find their was to the AAQ.

The issue is that we have many, many more registrations than we have questions, and that means we're apparently losing a lot of people in the process, who'd actually like to ask a question.

Comment 11

[Ibai Garcia [:ibai]]

What I'm saying is that the users who don't read the banner, will end up completing the Registration process and then, after they receive the email and confirm it...they are back to the first square. They are logged in but they don't know how to ask a question.

To me, the banner is not that clear. 

"Would you like to ask a question in the support forum?"

- Yes, I do! I guess I need to sign in or register.

It's not obvious that users need to click on the question. If they don't and they register, we can put them on the right track again by offering a mechanism, either in the email or in the registration confirmation page that they can ask a question by "clicking here".

Even if we make the banner more obvious and the call to action more important, I think that we need to offer these users another path to the AAQ because it seems (from the numbers that you are sharing) to be unclear.

And this should go in a different bug.