Site registration is something, it seems, many users just want to do as quickly as possible so that they can get on with doing what is actually important to them. Myself included. I’ve noticed this previously with my students, and when I was using Moodle, I tried to cut out all the unnecessary registration information to both expedite and simplify the process.
This year, with the online course book that we’re using at my university, students have a multi-step registration process, which is, in my opinion, setting students up for failure. Parts of the registration are available in their L1, but not until after some critical decisions have been made. Additionally, it is not obvious how to change the language settings (and I didn’t catch it until I walked several students through the process).
In fact, many of my students have indeed selected the wrong product (the 1st edition of a textbook rather than the 2nd, as the title on the text for the first edition is the same as we’re using in class, whereas the edition we’re using in class shows a higher-level textbook.), and because they’re both unlikely to read the English instructions and unable to, they continue forward, blindly, just doing what needs to get done so that they can get to their online homework assignments.
In my own classes, there was a rather convoluted process for finding all the information I needed for my program, and a couple of steps with special instructions that I missed, because, like my students, I wanted to get to the goal and I missed the process.
My take home: People are going to ignore registration instructions, look for the red asterisks that indicate a mandatory field, and get through the process as quickly as possible. It’s the same reason people click the “I Agree” box on EULAs. We assume familiarity indicates sameness, and we assume we don’t need to think about the process. Fix: call out special instructions or information separately, bringing awareness to it. Make it un-ignorable.
