A usability review of the sign up process in SlideShare. A few simple mistakes spoil an otherwise excellent user experience.

1. SlideShare Usability 1 : Sign Up Chris McEvoy

2. The “sign up” or registration screen might be the last thing the user sees if you don’t get it right. Simple mistakes can damage credibility. The HTML does not render correctly on IE7 at medium text size. “for a free accoun” ?

3. Please don’t make me think Clear instructions and an excellent feature that allows me to check the availability of a user name before I have submitted the form.

4. White lies and small print I select my password and write it down as usual. We pretend that I have read the small print and actually understand it.

5. Betrayal and Confusion(s) How cruel. You told me that “Chris McEvoy” was available, but then present me with a cryptic message explaining how foolish I am. If I can count one error, why can’t they.

6. Username or morse code? I replace the space with a dot and complete the other fields (again).

7. You’ve got mail Hooray, the verification email arrives almost immediately and seems to confirm that my username is Chris.McEvoy

8. Oops! I complete my profile and see that my user name has been changed from “Chris.McEvoy” to “Chris.mcevoy”. And the missing image doesn’t inspire much confidence.

9. Questions Why can’t I “really” choose my own username? Why does “check availability” lie to me? Why did they change all of the characters to lower-case apart from the first one? Why not pay a little more attention to the details? Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.