Progress Update: In search of alpha
Alpha testing started for me this week. Marcin opened it following the functionality testing and I began to look at the user experience. I concentrated on the sign-up/sign-in flow. This sounds simple—tons of websites have this kind of feature—but ours is different.
To begin, we offer our visitors the option to create a free, user profile. Everyone is familiar with this type of functionality. On Yahoo! or Google, for example, you can sign in to your free profile and have access to your customized Web pages. For example, you can choose what kind of news you want to see, weather for which cities, financial information, etc. You can also get direct access to your webmail.
We have something similar for regular users to customize their Respectance experience, but we also require that users have free profiles to allow them to create some content, like uploading editing & saving photos. Whereas, other content creation, like creating videos and leaving sympathy messages does not require sign in.
To make it more complicated, we also need to require profiles for users doing commerce transactions, like starting their own Respectance account dedicated to a loved one who has passed, sponsoring someone else’s account, paying for a file download, or any other system purchase.
In this case, we need to think more like travel sites, like expedia or travelocity. These sites allow users to customize their travel information/experience but then also make purchases that result from their browsing. In this case, billing details associated with the free profile are required.
The really big difference comes with our pricing structure. When users make the choice to start a new Respectance account, they need to choose whether they want an account sponsored by advertising (i.e. at no cost to them) or an account that they sponsor themselves (i.e. by selecting a payment term and method). This would be similar to an expedia user being delivered an alert about a flight, going online and booking the flight, then choosing whether or not to pay for it or get it for free.
So, we are essentially combining the free format with the billing format—with the purchase decision in the hands of the particular user. This means it doesn’t really follow the example of any site (at least that we know about); which means, we have to invent the model.
It may still not sound complicated—and when we first Visio’ed it out, it wasn’t so bad. But now that we’re looking at actual HTML pages connected to the backend database, the effects on the user experience become really clear.
That’s why we’re doing some re-thinking: a streamlined, intuitive experience is our primary focus, even when (or especially when!) it seems to compromise our technical logic or design flare. Keeping it simple is what users appreciate, but sometimes simplicity can be anything but simple to manufacture.
13 Oct
