The registration process on Aardvark provides a modal dialog that uses some nice content previews, content filtering, and progressive disclosure to guide the new user through the form.
How did you feel about the modal getting larger and more form elements unveiling themselves with each step forward? From the looks of it, the form has doubled in size by the time you reach the last step.
I wonder how effective it is to let people one step forward, only to take them another step back? Would it be easier if they just asked for the required stuff on sign up, and then did a follow-up once you verify your registration?
That said, the form itself is pretty well designed. Flows well, answers needed questions with brevity, and doesn't look like too much work (until that last step, of course).
On a side note, my homepage URL failed when I tried to post this comment because it didn't have the "http://" in it. Had no warning, wasn't aware I had to do it.
Oh man, failed two more times. I think this might workâwas misreading your error message. All I looked at was the http:// and assumed that I needed that. Turns out I did, but need to remove the "www"?
Alright, I give up. No link to my site today. Tried more than five times. And it still fails! Wow, okay, trying again to repost by going back to the original article now...
Holy crap, managed to get my site URL in there after a heck of a lot of persistence. Through some fluke it was let through with a misplaced dot following the http:// part.
Mark, I just got around to coming back to this post and looking at your issue. Sorry about the problems, but I wasn't able to reproduce it as anonymous. Wierd. Will try to look into it more.
Re: the dialog. I think it could have been just as easily done in a standalone page, actually, but am wondering if they have reasons for wanting to do as a dialog. Perhaps in the future, when people are viewing a page with content, they don't want them to leave that page? The growing length of the form might certainly produce problems, but the form isn't long, even on a netbook, they could use overflow I think. Not sure until I've tried it though.
I do think the overlay helps the user to realize that they'll end up where they started and can proceed with the task that inspired them to register once they're done with the process.
Comments