In an email conversation I was having with Jim last week, I wrote:
It’s a lot easier to google something than it is to find DaniWeb, sign up, create a username, activate your email address, navigate to the contribute page, come up with a topic title, figure out what tags to use, and type out a question. No one who posts on DaniWeb is being lazy. They might not know the right question to ask, or how to frame it, or what to include or not include. But they already crossed a lot of barriers and “put themselves out there” just to ask.
Then, fast forward to yesterday, and Jim and I both come across this thread where it's obvious that someone posted a homework question and then seemingly disappeared never to be seen again.
That got me thinking, so I did some investigating, and discovered that this user never verified their email address. That means that they never received any notifications that there were any updates posted in this thread, and, as a new member, no way of easily finding this thread again. (They would have to know to click the hamburger menu next to the logo, then click on Topics & Posts, then click on Topics You've Started, which isn't super intuitive for someone who has spent all of one day on DaniWeb.)
So, if anything, this is an onboarding bug. We let new users start threads without clicking a link emailed to them to verify their email, but, until they click that link, we don't email them at all. That means that not only did this new user not get any alerts that someone responded to their new thread, but, even worse, they didn't get the email saying thank you for starting a thread with a link to said thread (so they can easily find it again).
This is not a lazy user. This is a poor, buggy user experience. Mea culpa.
So now where to go from here? The problem lies within the email verification process. In most cases, when someone joins, they are emailed a link to verify their email address. The problem is that, especially with some ISPs such as @yahoo.com, this email can be delayed anywhere from 24 to 48 hours. There's never a guarantee of email delivery. For this reason, it's not ideal to not allow new users to post before verifying their email address.
For example, suppose I'm a new user. I have a question. I click on Contribute, and I fill out my question. Then, upon hitting submit, I am brought to the signup page to choose a username, password, and email address, to complete the signup process and post my question that I have just typed in. At this point, it doesn't make sense for me to wait in limbo for a few days.
... Or does it? Should this part of the onboarding process simply tell the user that their post or topic won't go live until they verify their email? What if the verification email never comes? When you send as much bulk email as I do, you have experience knowing it's not just @yahoo.com that can pose a problem. It's a mainstream issue.
And, because it was an issue, that's why we allowed people to start interacting with DaniWeb without having to verify their email. So therein lies the problem, because we don't consistently nag the user that they haven't verified their email (just one single, dismissible, alert per browser session), and then they can go on without realizing they're missing out on anything.
So, I'm going to look into two things today. The first is more nagging of unverified users. The second is looking into browser notification alerts.
Anyone have any other ideas or suggestions to improve the onboarding experience? (Feel free to create a dummy account and go through the process to see what the experience is like for a newbie.)