If it’s one thing I learned through experience and feedback, it’s to make the registration process easy enough that it doesn’t require much thinking. When a person starts having to think about the registration, perception kicks in followed by the ‘what if’ contradiction and that affects the flow of getting them to register as a member.
I’ve got one example here of an unorthodox registration process. It’s been debated about the alert boxes popping up on your monitor and what kind of effects it gives a user. One of it is that its sudden action creates a feeling of insecurity that the user might have done something wrong. But the cooling period later is when they read the alert message.
So let’s talk about the image I’ve included here. On the alert message, it reads “Your request has been submitted for processing. Please wait. Do not press escape to abort this process.”
The message popped up after I clicked continue. When the alert popped up, I thought an error occurred till I read the message. After reading the message, I waited for the next action to happen. Minutes passed and the page was still as it was. I did think about closing the alert window but was worried if I did, I’d be doing something wrong. The next thing that came to my mind was if I didn’t know the escape (Esc) was a button, I’d be confused and try to click the OK later. But of course, because the alert message told me to initially not do anything I just continued waiting.
I was getting annoyed so I tried opening the page in Internet Explorer using my IETab (Firefox add-on). The same message popped up but after a few minutes I was taken to the next step of the registration process. The continuation asked for my personal details like address and mobile number. I was wondering why would they need these particulars if all I wanted to do was join the forum.
And the worst part is that if I didn’t fill those personal particulars, I wasn’t allowed to register as a member. So in the end, I just gave up registering and don’t think I’ll want to go through that experience again.
In conclusion, they just lost a possible member.
Do you have a bad registration experience to share?