New on the support page for Storymill/Tidepool:
<wah> Why Do I have to create an account???
On Storymill, we create your own unique web space for your photos and your tags in Tidepool. It’s a required web thing. Accounts help to build communities of users, and to allow you to share to friends and vice versa. We do not ever give out/sell your personal information.
Well, I imagine this is in response to my recent rant about the Tidepool download process. The question is a pretty good summary of my post, anyway. The answer, however, is not quite what I had hoped for, so here’s part 2 of my armchair usability critique of the Tidepool download process.
Tidepool (the photo tagging/management app) is tightly integrated with Storymill (the photo sharing service). You have to sign up for Storymill before you can even download Tidepool. That’s OK, but it’s unusual. There are few applications with such a policy. It’s probably not what users expect, and worth explaining on the site.
When you click the Tidepool download link, then you’ve probably seen the Storymill homepage, the Tidepool homepage, and the Tidepool features page on your way. None of these pages explain the relationship between the two entities, or tell that you must have Storymill to download Tidepool. This is a problem.
The download link doesn’t lead to a download (as the name suggests), but to a login form. This violates users’ expectation, which always is a no-no.
What I would have loved to experience: A straightforward, no-fuss download. Playing around with the app a bit. Stumbling across the “Publish your photos to the web” menu option. Clicking it. Creating a Storymill account from within the app.
Or, alternatively: Clicking the download link. Arriving at a registration form (not a login form) that explains: “You need a Storymill account to use Tidepool. Sign up here! It’s free.” or something to that effect. The registration form should ask me for an absolute minimum of information (username, email, password). Asking me for my full name there is a non-starter. No optional fields either. I can set these later on my profile page. Flickr does this very well.
I will stop now and sign up and download the damned thing and start playing with it.
Great ideas! where were you at beta time? You can post such feature ideas on the forum… but first you must register (ack!). you’ll love this: we don’t yet have it auto-linked to the same username/password ;=) — you don’t have to rant about that one :=)
BTW: some of the difficulties in creating a smooth sequence of download events lies in the following:
1) Tidepool needs to know the user’s URL to make unique tags from the get-go. (We decided not to try creating tags with local URL, then converting them on the fly when uploaded.)
2) going straight to a registration page might seem weird to an existing user who just needs to login. but maybe, if it is just username, password, email, we can get away with it.
tim and i will have to ponder a few different scenarios.
for now, simply trying to better explain it will be a good start, eh? (shoot, doesn’t everyone know what we mean?)