TOPIC: Issues with registered users

Last year, you guys rolled out a nice feature where unregistered users could create login information during an event registration. This is a great idea as it does not force users to first register for the site then come back and register for the event. This year, users who registered last year come back and fill in all of their event information and on the last part, after they filled everything in, they type in their user name and password and hit the next button only to have everything just sit there. If the email was used previously, there is no way for them to register without closing out, coming back in and logging in to the site before registering for an event.

There is no clear way other than repeated text warnings for them to know to watch out for this and it makes for a very unintuitive user experience. Would it be possible for the login / create login process to happen up front once the user clicks on the register button? They could be then prompted to login or create a login like you are doing in the end then continue with the rest of the registration. Just having the whole thing hang after putting in a lot of information just isn't cutting it with our users and we like them.

I moved the email field up to the first position on the form. As soon as the user enters their email, the system checks to see if there is an account associated with that email and if so, displays a warning "A user account already exists with this email account. If it is yours, please login prior to registering for this event". That way the user will know right away that they need to login before filling out any more registration data.

This is still after they enter all of their team member info correct? If I can put it up front ahead of everything else then it's still a poor user experience but better than what I have now. I don't see a way to do this. I can set the email field to be ahead of the rest of the billing information but that's still after the individual registering inputs all of the info for up to six team members. If you were the team leader and put in six pages of info only to find out that you needed to exit out and login, thus losing it all, how would you feel about your experience? If I'm missing something, please tell me.

I'm only dealing with individual registrations so it is not as much of an issue. I can see now where you will have an issue with group registrations.

I would probably just force the user to login or create an account in joomla before getting to the registration process to avoid the negative experience. While it is not a completely smooth process it will be a better user experience than going through and filling out a bunch of form data and then losing it all because you are not logged in.

Steve - could you provide me with a quick walkthrough or the code of how you did this? I can also be reached at steve at nycruns dot com. Thanks.

nycruns wrote: Steve - could you provide me with a quick walkthrough or the code of how you did this? I can also be reached at steve at nycruns dot com. Thanks.

Not sure what you are actually asking for. To force the user to login before registering, you can just make the event Private. The user will still see the event but when they click Register, they will be notified that they need to login before registering.

If you are just trying to check the Email field for whether the user has an account before the user enter the rest of the form data, you just need to move the Email field to the first position of all your fields.