User blog:Brandon Rhea/A new placement for Registration and Sign In buttons

Today, we are releasing a change&mdash;based on the results of a successful experiment&mdash;to add a Registration button and a Sign In button to the upper right-hand side of the page for logged out users.

As many of you know, the rollout of FandomDesktop moved the global Fandom navigation bar from the top of the page to the left-hand side of the page. This was intended to solve a few problems. One, we wanted to see if more people would interact with the left-hand nav than they did with the top nav. Two, since the local nav follows you on scroll, it freed up horizontal space by having the global nav functionality elsewhere. Global and local navs, therefore, stay stickied.

However, it placed the registration and login buttons in an unintuitive place.

Experiment overview
To keep the positive benefits of the left-hand navigation while also looking to increase the number of account registrations, we experimented with new placements for logged out users for registration and logging in based on testing two hypotheses:


 * 1) The location of the registration button is essential. The current location in the bottom left of the screen may not be as effective as the top right corner (where the registration button is most commonly found)
 * 2) Exposing the registration button directly on the page as a button as opposed to hiding it in a submenu of the profile icon will make it easier to find the button and convert to registrations.

Both variants yielded positive results, with the second variant with the text being the most successful and even outperforming the registration rate from before the global nav bar change. So with that in mind, we’re rolling out Variant 2 to all users. Note that while the screenshots above use FanCentral [Beta ] for the mocks, this applies across the platform.

What we’re releasing
Here’s an example of how these new buttons will look on a wiki, using the Pixar Wiki’s main page as an example:



Note that this change is just for logged out users, given that logged in users are already registered and signed in.

This is an example of the types of experiments we hope to be doing this year, where we continue to take an approach of experimenting first in order to prove out a concept before fully developing it as a feature. Those experiments are still in the process of being brainstormed and refined, so we’ll share more information once we have it.

Keep an eye out for updates on upcoming Technical Update blogs as we highlight experiments completed by our teams!