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Have you ever tried to login to your own service?
When people visit a pbwiki site, and try to edit a page, they are greeted with a simply ridiculous page that is hopelessly convoluted. I have not had one single person not need help with something that should be effortless.
Have you ever pretended you were a plain dumb user, unfamiliar with your concepts, and studied your "Log in Page?"
What is an invite? They have no clue. Next, they try getting an account on the left. That fails, so as most sites require some form of login, they naturally want do do SOMETHING, so they try entering an "identity" on the right.
Unless they have a wikiword already, (you do not even tell them they need one), they will struggle with at least 3 ways of signing in, and they all fail.
The only way they will ever find a signup screen for pbwiki--which you don't even explain why this is useful at all--is if they click the LOGIN button on the identity side. Most never do. They just leave.
You cannot get satisfied users if you run them off at this early stage. I sent a few dozen people, and most are still emailing me, totally confused.
I am very disappointed that with all your staff, someone doesn't take the time to write a clear and concise login text with logical links on on it. If you would like me to do it, I would be happy to help, but something has to change.
Have you ever pretended you were a plain dumb user, unfamiliar with your concepts, and studied your "Log in Page?"
What is an invite? They have no clue. Next, they try getting an account on the left. That fails, so as most sites require some form of login, they naturally want do do SOMETHING, so they try entering an "identity" on the right.
Unless they have a wikiword already, (you do not even tell them they need one), they will struggle with at least 3 ways of signing in, and they all fail.
The only way they will ever find a signup screen for pbwiki--which you don't even explain why this is useful at all--is if they click the LOGIN button on the identity side. Most never do. They just leave.
You cannot get satisfied users if you run them off at this early stage. I sent a few dozen people, and most are still emailing me, totally confused.
I am very disappointed that with all your staff, someone doesn't take the time to write a clear and concise login text with logical links on on it. If you would like me to do it, I would be happy to help, but something has to change.
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Inappropriate?To make things even worse, your Form design breaks completely in IE6. If the user's window is too small, all the text boxes wrap down and outside the PbWiki identity login box. Thus, the user doesn't even see the fields unless they scroll down the page.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Hi Tech,
You're right, there are some seriously confusing steps there, and the login screen isn't up to snuff. We use PBwiki all day and we get just as frustrated at times, but there's good news on the horizon.
We're well along on the process of making this make much more in line with user's expectations, better designed, and obvious. Much of the last few months of development work we've done on PBwiki are around refining the mechanisms and design of logins and the various access controls but for the time being it's not reflected in what you're seeing on the site right now. The upcoming release of our next-generation layout and wiki system address logins and access, much-improved editing experience and performance, and overall look-and feel. There are lots of improvements in addition that but the core of your frustration here, logins, is much much better.
We've been laying plumbing for the new PBwiki and some of the confusing parts of what you see now are a result of rolling out portions of that plumbing without really working through the usability on the current generation of the product. Some of the features and forms feel tacked-on because they are, and they're temporary until we are ready to go live with the full redesigned product. I'm frustrated too, but the new system is so smooth (and pretty) that we think it'll be worth the wait.
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Inappropriate?Thanks Nathan. I understand versioning toward the future. I'd still suggest that your current base is trying to sign up new potential customers, so fixing at least someone as basic as a login screen might make some sense.
What's the ship date on this new release? -
Inappropriate?Tech,
Thanks for voicing your frustration. It could be very helpful for us if you were to sketch out what a better login interface would look like - you could end up inspiring an improvement for all our users!
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