I’ve spent a couple of days on and off redesigning the “sign up a team” at my tournament site, pwned.no. The currently live form is divided into two sections, depending on wether you want to sign up one of your existing teams or want to just sign up a temporarily created team — or one you haven’t created a proper team for yet:
I’m not happy about the fact that the form is actually divided into two parts, meaning that you have to read two sections to actually understand that you can sign up with an existing team – or write the name of one right there. The forms also have information that are common for both forms, so we’re duplicating a few user interface elements.
The new form still lack a bit of functionality to dynamically enable and disable the submit button based on the selection in the form, but since disabling the form made it look uglier than ugly, I haven’t added that bit yet. The screenshots also differs a bit since Opera and Firefox doesn’t quite agree on the double border CSS.
The new, complete version:
And if you don’t have any existing teams (clans) available, the form now includes a link to the page where you can create one – and try to explains why you should do that.
Also, if you’re not logged in, you’re just presented with the simple form. I think I’m going to add a notice about signing in with a bit of text in the same gist as the create clan bit.
Hopefully this will help reduce any confusion, but luckily the form is quite small anyways. I’ve also added more proper error hilighting, both before signing up and after failing to do so for any reason. Small fixes, but they should increase usability.
Any suggestions of potential ways to enhance this form even more would of course be appreciated!