It's a new year and time for a lot of webinar technology vendors to make some resolutions to help their customers. By the way, I'm looking squarely at you, market share giants Cisco and Citrix!
I have written many times over many years about the importance of registration pages for webinars. Layout, cosmetics, and functionality of a registration page have a direct and tangible impact on its performance in collecting leads and encouraging signups for a web event. Anything that lessens the success of those objectives harms the customer. Vendors who lock in poor registration page practices should be ashamed. Customers who have to put up with counterproductive limitations should be up in arms and demanding enhancements.
I'll just reiterate some of the most important design elements that I find missing in far too many webinar products:
- Mobile Accessibility: Pages should reorient appropriately for portrait vs. landscape layouts, work without additional app download for iOS and Android, and ensure that things like dropdown menus fit on the screen.
- Branding: Not just a case of allowing the host to slap their logo on the page, this also includes the ability to customize colors to match the hosting company's website and more importantly, getting the webinar vendor's branding OFF the page.
- Override Standard Field Names: Don't force me to use your labels for standard fields. Let me change your "First Name" and "Last Name" to "Given Name" and "Family Name" if I want to. Let me change "Title" to "Position" or "Function." Let me change "Company" to "Organisation."
- Conditional Fields: In this day and age, why is "State/Province" still a static field on the page? If a registrant selects "USA" then show the dropdown for "State." If they select "Canada" then show the smaller dropdown for "Province." If they select another country, don't show that field!
- Arbitrary Text: Allow me to add a line of text on the page just as I add custom fields so I can put instructions or explanations where I feel they would help.
- Layout Order: Don't force your standard fields to appear first, followed by my custom fields. Let me choose the order for everything that appears on the page.
- Submit Button: Let me change the label, color, and size of the "Register" or "Submit" button. This has been experimentally proven to affect performance. Let me test what works best for my audiences.
- Contact/Help button or link: Allow administrators to add a single click way for registrants to communicate with someone who can help them or answer questions.
Webinar users and customers - If your vendor allows you to have this sort of customization, consider yourself lucky and let them know how much you value it. If your technology limits you in these areas, raise a stink about it! Vendors make their product development plans based on complaints and requests from customers. If you don't let them know it's important, it will never change.
