Imagine you’re signing up for a new online service and their signup form is asking for your username and password.
Seems pretty straightforward, right?
You enter your preferred username and use an online password generator to add your secure password with letters, numbers, and symbols.
And select their Signup button.
You wait a few seconds, only to receive a warning message that your password doesn’t fit their requirements.
You can’t use the backslash or ampersand symbol in your password.
What in the world?
Couldn’t the signup form provided info about what was required? Before you entered your password?
Argh!
That sense of frustration and annoyance is something we often experience whenever we sign up for an online service.
And we shouldn’t have to, if the designers kept the user in mind when they designed the signup form.
Thankfully, that sense of frustration didn’t happen to me this week when I signed up for Get Together event management for local communities.
Which is why I’m giving them a shoutout as my UX Win for this month.
Get Together Event Management
As an open source alternative to Meetup.com, Get Together event manager offers event registration and promotion features for meetup groups looking for a cost-effective way to manage their events.
I only discovered Get Together Event Management this week, when I was chatting on Twitter about my frustrations with Meetup.com for our local meetup event management.
After chatting with Michael Hall, one of the Get Together developers, I learned their online event manager offers Markdown for team and event descriptions, which makes it easy to add headings and other formatting.
Nice to have an option to format content for our events!
It’s something I used all the time for the multiple meetup groups I help organize, before Meetup.com removed it two years ago with their redesign.
I’ll be exploring Get Together in the future for our Refresh Detroit and West Metro Detroit WordPress groups.
Don’t Make Users Think
I think we can all agree nobody likes to fill out signup forms. They can be time-consuming and get in the way of what we want to do.
What can designers do to create an easy-to-use signup form?
Focus on the user.
Create a form that is quick and easy for users to complete, without requiring users to waste time trying to figure out how the form works.
First challenge: how can you design a form that encourages people to signup for your service, without overwhelming them by asking for too much information?
Only ask for the information you need.
With Get Together, they’ve accomplished that goal with a short signup form that only asks for the essential information:
- Username
- Password
- Password confirmation
I could argue that the password confirmation field isn’t needed. Rather, I would allow users to unmask the password field using a “Show password” option that could turn masking on or off as needed.
Why hide the password someone is typing in for the first time? Let the user see it so they won’t forget what their password is.
Second challenge: what can designers do to provide username and password requirements?
Provide the information to users upfront, with information for each field that has specific requirements.
Get Together shines with their clear, easy to find patterns for both username and passwords.
Usernames need to be 150 characters or less. Only letters, digits, and @/./+/-/_ are allowed.
Passwords can’t be too similar to your other personal info, must contain at least eight characters, can’t be a commonly used passwords, and can’t be entirely numeric.
Summary
Filling out signup forms doesn’t need to be a frustrating task for users, if designers keep the user in mind.
From my experience signing up, I give high fives to Get Together for:
- Designing a short form, only asking for essential info
- Providing info on the username and password requirements upfront
Thank you, Get Together for creating an easy-to-use signup process.
I’ve signed up and I’ll be exploring the features of their event manager. Expect to see a post in the near future on my findings.
Taking the time to pay attention to the details made for a user-friendly Get Together signup process.
