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

[renegade500.livejournal.com]

I personally would like to see a link on the top navigation bar that said membership instead of registration. It didn't even connect with me that registration was membership, so I clicked on the link on the right hand side under quick links that said buy a membership.

I think since so many of us in this community think of the language of membership when wanting to "register" for a con, calling it registration creates a little bit of a cognitive disconnect that doesn't immediately register as being the same thing.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

In the end, for this event, I think that "Registration" is more likely to be something that the people who don't understand what a "membership" is will understand. They are the ones who've never attended a fannish convention and think of WFC as a nothing but a professional writers' conference. They don't understand our jargon, and the only reference they are likely to have is any other sort of professional conference they've attended. What I definitely do not want to do is frighten away prospective members who think that they can't attend unless they are already "members" of some organization.

I am learning something here, though, and I hope others reading this are, too. Our own jargon is potentially excluding new members because they see "membership" and don't understand it. While I'm certainly someone who says we sell "memberships" for a reason, it's off-putting to people who find us for the first time.