Dne 9.8.2012 04:42, Jim Henderson napsal(a):
On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:36:29 -0500, Rajko wrote:
On Wed, 8 Aug 2012 17:10:47 +0000 (UTC) Jim Henderson
wrote: ... but without concrete data, it's difficult to even prioritize this possible issue.
Core issue is that we have mess in login, sign in, sign up, register path, and it is not possible issue. If you have mess on a first step that new user has to take, then what one can expect later.
But Rajko, that's still anecdotal, not hard data. It's guessing there must be a problem because of how it's designed.
I'll limit myself to discuss the number of fields in the form now. The fact that every additional field in a form lowers the percentage of people that complete it is a well established fact by multiple studies. Just Google e.g. for "conversion rate number of form fields" and spend some time going through the links to see some examples. Or read any good usability book. I consider the above to be "hard" enough. I don't see any reason why the registration form should be an exception.
That's not to say there isn't a problem, but as a friend of mine who works for Google is fond of saying, "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."
The only reliable way to see how the complex and personal-data-acquiring form affects the number of registered users I know of is an A/B test: prepare a simplified version of the form and measure the difference in registration rates.
On the forums alone, we have currently 69,105 registered members - which means we have that many people who have gone through the registration process for the forums alone - and once that's done, they have access to Bugzilla, the wiki, and everything else in the openSUSE project that requires authentication. Even SUSE Studio and OBS.
Significantly less than 1% of those people have complained about the process it took to get registered - and the openSUSE forums have always used this registration process since their inception with the forum merge project.
People who don't complete the registration process don't complain, they leave. Also, the fact that "it was always like that and worked somehow" is not a relevant argument here. Computers also worked well when they had 640k RAM but they have GBs today. The question is whether this can work better. Maybe these 69k users could have been 138k today if the form was simplified long time ago.
Note that I'm not saying it's perfect by any stretch. I'm just saying that relative to the other issues that have been under investigation, a working (if even somewhat convoluted) registration process is relatively "small potatoes".
To me, it seems weird to question the priority of this in 2012, when every startup optimizes their front page and registration process like crazy, people often refuse to buy in e-shops requiring registration, and there is an entry on Hacker News about a workflow simplification leading to increased conversion rate every month. -- David Majda SUSE Studio developer http://susestudio.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org