Lost

The other day, we lost a student in our program. Our website, still in beta, was a bit too buggy and too confusing. He or she was right to leave, we should have put more time into user testing. Instead of throwing out half-baked ideas, we should have made them a little more solid. We released a student site and sent them a link, but didn't link to it on our homepage. We did have a link to our forum, but our forum username wasn't the same as the student username and password. But we learned from that experience. We're focusing heavily now on usability. We're trimming unnecessary fat and trying to unify our systems. I lost one student, but I don't want to lose another for similar reasons.

So, if we send out a link to it, the link better be on the front page. Also, people like to have a button that says "login". Finally, if you have multiple features, the login information should be consistent among all three. Since we grew organically and a little haphazardly, we didn't think of these things. Now they've bitten us and it is time to fix them.