Usability Question

[kevin_standlee]

If you are kproche or anyone else who has worked on the 2009 World Fantasy Con web site, you're ineligible for this question because you already know the answer.

If you wanted to find you whether you were a member of the 2009 WFC and you went to the convention's web site, where do you think you would find this information, if anywhere? If you can't figure it out, what would you suggest changing to make it easier to find? Update: To do this in the spirit intended, I ask that you don't look at the comments until after at least trying with or without the hints below. The comments essentially give the game away, and I'm trying to learn something.

Hint 1: I assure you that the membership list is on the web site, and it is linked from one of the pages that is linked to the top level; that is, if you are at the home page, you're only two clicks away from it.

Hint 2: When you click on some of the menu items, a second level of menus will appear below the first level if there is more information available.

The underlying issue is that if you label the section "Membership" then people will ask (and they have) "How do I register to attend?" or "How much does the convention cost after I've bought my membership?" or "Why do I have to buy a membership when I only want to attend?" or something like that. If you label it "Registration" (which is what I did after getting those questions too many times), you get people asking "I can't find anything on your web site about membership." And if you label it "Registration/Membership," you use up too much real estate and probably confuse both groups of people.

Some people solve this by linking everything from the home page, but that turns the home page into a sea of nothing but links, and it causes a lot of people's eyes to glaze over. I prefer a heirarchical style, but it's not good for people who don't see logical relationships between the subject headings and the items under that subject.

My basic problem is that I want to make everyone happy, and I think it's impossible to do that because of the significantly different ways that people look at information.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That's a defensive/"can't do anything about it" response to a request for information :-) but understandable ...

I don't mean to be defensive! I'm looking for things that I can change, but not everything can be changed, not without tearing the entire site apart, and we're not going to do that. There's a balancing act involved here between ease of use, ease of maintenance, and availability of people points. (We're trying to avoid the common fannish malady of letting the Perfect be the enemy of the Good Enough.)

I think the Membership/Registration issue is not helped by having the current Quick Links say "Buy a membership" but the top level menu saying "Registration".

That's because we're trying to get the message across to two groups of people whose understanding doesn't completely overlap. I'm having to learn to look at things from the point of view of people who haven't attended many (or any) conventions before, and who find jargon terms like "membership" confusing, while also accommodating long-time members for whom "membership" is the only term they'll recognize. As it happens in the case you cite, you end up in the same place eventually.

The entire membership/registration issue strikes me as another Showdown at Generation Gap.

And I'd never have thought for looking for "Publications" under "Registration" :-)

I don't expect it will stay there. In fact, that page really shouldn't even be visible (there's nothing in it!) so thank you for pointing it out to me so I can take it out of the public inventory.

For Eastercon we went with "Membership"...

What CMS are you using? At least I assume that there's some sort of content management system in use so that you don't have to be a web designer to change things.

WordPress was originally designed as blogging software, but it works surprisingly well as a content management system for many sites. And it's simple enough to use that there are several of us on the committee who are not people with web design experience but who can manage the content of the pages within the existing system.

CMS

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

For the original Redemption pages we had a hand-rolled one written in, wait for it, MS-Access! So much of the stuff was driven by databases (membership, hotel, programme etc.) that it was easier writing Visual Basic (particularly as I'd already written all the webpage stuff for another project and had permission to reuse it for conventions)

Eastercon and Redemption are sufficiently small and slow changing that we can just wrap the menu/header/footer around a fairly simple document and have someone apply the styles as part of the "go live" of the page ... for data driven pages (like membership list) the list adds in the appropriate tags.

There's very little beyond h1, h2, body, textbox and putting in links and graphics. Again this was a deliberate design decision ... pages are there to convey information, styling is preset in CSS.

We have several people on committee/staff who are able to do the small amount of tagging required, and use a central document site (with access controls!) so any one of them can edit a page on the live website.

Membership vs Registration: oh, I got that you were using both terms to try to capture people's eye on the front page, but I still feel that by using both, you build a distinction that they cover differ areas. I think a "Have I Joined?" on the Quick Links would be good, and an FAQ page which would act, in part, as a sitemap.

I did the 2007 Eastercon using Kompozer as my WYSIWYG editor