Users fail to create new profile, click "login" instead of "create profile"
Observation
Many (most!) users will click "login" instead of "create profile" the first time despite the text telling them what to do.
The user should select a user name and password, enter their email address then click "create profile" button.
Instead, the user click the login button.
- Users observed are new to wiki. They are technical professionals (engineering and science background), but not computer programmers. The use the web and email, but don't participate in online forums.
- Approximately 3 users reported that creating an account didn't work. When troubleshooting with one user, I saw that "login" was being clicked instead of "create profile."
MoinMoin version 1.3.4
- Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP/2000. The theme is sinorca4moin.
Discussion
I believe this is because "Login" is highlighted (presumably because that's the most used option). Maybe the combination preferences, login, create an account page is confusing? --GregWhittier
- Do they click Enter (activate the default "login" button) or click the "login" button?
- The single user physically observed clicked "login."
I think that the major problem is the combination of preferences, login, create an account on one page is confusing. We should separate each action to its own page -- NirSoffer 2005-05-12 21:04:54
I agree with Nir. We need different pages for different actions. I observed many users making this error.
Another agreement
This has been a constant headache for me. We use moinmoin in our corporate environment (and love it!). But every single first time user runs into this problem. These are smart computer-savvy users, but the way it's done in moinmoin is non-standard. I don't know of any other piece of software out there that tries to merge these two functions ("create a user" & "login") into one screen. They're not logical things to group together.
- This is a known problem.
To make things worse, when one tries to edit a page as a non-logged in user, they aren't told "You must login first"; instead they receive a cryptic message "You are not allowed to edit this page.", which tells them that they are doing something against the rules.
- Telling "you must login" would be even worse. As we don't know who the user really is, we cannot generally promise that logging in would help (except for Known: maybe, but not generic). Just imagine a page only editable by some specific person or group.
But worst of all, if I could only find that page, I could change the description to something more meaningful, but grepping through the moinmoin directory doesn't find it.
- The system texts are not on wiki pages, but under MoinMoin/i18n.
yet another agreement
Yes, this happens. It also happened to me - after I installed moin 1.3.5 on the company intranet. I think it is not that big a deal for techie types who will figure it out.
a proposal
What about identifying a user account with a user's home page? Creating a user account then has two steps then:
- create a new page with the user's name
- make this page "private": have an action "create user from this page", which asks for email, password etc.
Many of the users' data can be interpreted to be just another view on a page - maybe the "controlled keywords view"? As an advantage of this solution you can tangle the creation (and deletion!) of accounts narrowly to the acl concept. jbusse
Another Proposal
I am currently experiencing this phenomenon on an anoyingly large scale (30 out of 60 people have problems creating a new account, 16 of the other 30 have a problem creating their user page).
I have created a mockup of what I believe a good account creation and login procedure would look like on ChristophKoenig/LoginPages. Note that I am no usability expert. I have just merged what I read here with the feedback of 30 of my own users. And I have tried to do as much of the necessary work, leaving for the devs what only devs can do 
-- ChristophKoenig 2006-10-19 14:24:28