I've received feedback on this from multiple potential participants. I didn't find this puzzling myself when I did it on my laptop, but I had not tried on mobile before and everyone is different. I do provide instructions, but instructions should not be necessary for this, and most of the time people just don't read instructions. It seems that most of these people report that they notice the "Create PollUnit" button that stands out as it is highlighted in white.
If someone enters the participant link first instead of signing up, there is a banner that says you have to sign up but it is very narrow and easy to miss. And on mobile, I could not find how to register until I scrolled way down to the bottom of the screen. Not many people are going to do that. It's a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom. If users click on the participant link first, a dialog is displayed where folks can either log in but not register. There should be a big button to "Sign up" below the button to "Log in". Upon closer inspection, I see that under the dialog box it says “No PollUnit account yet?” and a Sign up button under it. But still you need to look around for that and people have no patience.
I realize that User Interface (UI) Design is challenging when balancing the objectives of selling your product and making free options intuitive at the same time, but I think you could come closer to meeting both objective in your page designs. When my contest is closed, my organization plans on doing a survey soon after to learn how we can improve our contest next year. I will be happy to share any survey results about using PollUnit with PollUnit developers.
Thank you very much for taking the time to share such detailed and thoughtful feedback!
Based on your feedback, we have since adjusted the mobile navigation:
There is now a clearly visible »Register« option on the top level of the mobile menu.
We would be very interested in any insights or results from your upcoming survey and would be happy to review them to further improve the PollUnit experience.
Thanks, the addition of the Register link in the mobile menu helps. However what about for bigger screens?
Ideally, I'd like to tell voters to use the participant link first. When someone does this, on both mobile and larger screens, they see a dialog to log in. There are 4 options below that you need to scroll down to see on all size screens. Is there any way you can redesign the layout so these options are visible at the same time the dialog is visible?
Do you mean the authentication providers (Google, Facebook, GitHub, and SSO) on our registration page? They are visible on desktop for the most common screen resolutions. If the screen becomes too small, scrolling is required.
A redesign is currently not planned, so any major changes would need to wait.
I'm not talking about SSO options. I'm referring to if someone wants to sign up using an email. I understand if you think that the Register link at the top of the page is adequate. However I have gotten feedback from potential voters whose eyes were drawn to the Create PollUnit button at the far right instead and intuitively wanted to press that. My solution for this is now sending them the direct link to the sign up form at https://pollunit.com/users/sign_up instead of to https://pollunit.com. But then this means I may need to also tell them where to go to log in.
You could create custom CSS to get rid of the button with something like that:
.buildHelperButton {
display: none !important;
}
Custom CSS is part of our themes.
