Public (Open Membership) Click to Join Prompt

I've seen web designers modify this via CSS. 

I was hoping for something a little easier (i.e. a setting that I could adjust).  Sounds like that isn't the case.  Thanks for confirming.

Hi Sarah. We noticed our customers getting tripped up here too. After more consideration, we decided to move to mostly Joinless groups to create a better user experience so there are less steps for them to be able to post and reply. 

Thank you!  I'll see if this is something I can update. 

I'm very interested in tracking membership, otherwise I'd definitely go that route.  Thanks for the suggestion though!

Yes the journey to 'join' a group is not intuitive to users at all. 

What also trips up engagement is that all buttons for 'create blog' or 'new' or even commenting are completely hidden if the user hasn't joined the group.

Which is weird, because I would have expected the experience to be to show these things as a 'call to action' and then prompt the user to join the group upon trying to engage, and then informing the user as to what will happen when they join, and what joining entails and means.

Hey there Christopher G. Stanton - just to confirm one thing that may need to be adjusted on your site. In the Group - Banner widget, there is an option to show the New button to not logged in users:

which would then ask the user to sign in:

I hope this helps! Let us know if we can help you through getting this sorted. Thanks!

The 'New' button renders if you're logged out.



If you're logged in, and it's a PublicOpen group, the New button doesn't render if you're not a member of the group.


This is a poor user journey.

It would make sense if it did render, and then prompted the user to join and become a member of the group when they clicked it, like it prompts users to login when they click it when logged out.

The same happens if you're trying to comment on content and you're not a member of the group, too.

Thank you sir and understood! I will pass this feedback along to our Product team and will dig around a bit myself on this.

The one thing to keep in mind is membership does not necessarily define ability.  The New button will be visible based on a user's permission set.  In other words, that generally means a user has the ability to create content in at least one place in a group.

While generally membership comes what certain permissions, the visibility can not be controlled by membership, as owners can go into a group or application and revoke create permissions for members, or can grant create permissions to every user, not just members(New button would be visible again).

Patrick M. said:

the visibility can not be controlled by membership

Patrick M. said:

not just members(New button would be visible again).

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it appears you're contradicting yourself or stating what we've already pointed out, unfortunately stating the functionality of the site doesn't negate it being a bad user experience with how people want to use the platform.

The problem that's being laid out here is that when participation and creating content is controlled by being a member of a group, it is difficult to make that restriction obvious to users because the buttons for participation are hidden due to permissions.

This should be clear in the screenshots I provided.

It doesn't make sense to purposefully restrict participation using the permissions to only members, only to then decide to change that to every user.

Another user in this thread has also expressed that they want to encourage members to join groups so that they can better assess interest in those groups.

Further, notifications and subscriptions to groups for users are somewhat tied to being a member of the group?

So for a better user journey, and to let them be able to see what's possible to do in a group, especially when the website is public facing, we need a better user journey that allows them to see that they have options to participate in that group, and when engaging with those participation options, they are then prompted to join that group.

At present, the permissions granted are hidden behind the obscure grey 'join' banner and perhaps the 'join' button on the Actions bar, and it would appear that it's not only one community the user experience gets confused with this.

Christopher G. Stanton said:

The problem that's being laid out here is that when participation and creating content is controlled by being a member of a group, it is difficult to make that restriction obvious to users because the buttons for participation are hidden due to permissions.

This is where there is some confusion, content creation in reality is not controlled by membership.  Nor is subscriptions or notifications.   Everything is governed by permissions.

Membership is really just a template of permissions for the group outlining a common set of permissions for specific scenarios, but are highly customizable and frequently change from the default to suit varying scenarios specific to a community.

Christopher G. Stanton said:

It doesn't make sense to purposefully restrict participation using the permissions to only members, only to then decide to change that to every user.

This is just an example of what can be done, but is probably not as unheard of as you might think.  A more common scenario is to do the reverse, to allow membership but further restrict.  So you may have a group where you want people to join but they cannot post, in which case they are still members, but would have no new button.   

Christopher G. Stanton said:

Which is weird, because I would have expected the experience to be to show these things as a 'call to action' and then prompt the user to join the group

While technically possible this is where the idea of forcing membership using the content creation flow does not necessarily work because that creation is not based on membership.  You could end up with a result where the button is clicked, the user joins, and the next thing they receive is an Access denied message. This would end up not improving the experience at all.  

The goal is here is to explain why the content creation controls hide as they do and why the  better solution is as directed, you can customize the theme or the widget to make Join more prominent.

Christopher G. Stanton said:

The problem that's being laid out here is that when participation and creating content is controlled by being a member of a group, it is difficult to make that restriction obvious to users because the buttons for participation are hidden due to permissions.

This is where there is some confusion, content creation in reality is not controlled by membership.  Nor is subscriptions or notifications.   Everything is governed by permissions.

Membership is really just a template of permissions for the group outlining a common set of permissions for specific scenarios, but are highly customizable and frequently change from the default to suit varying scenarios specific to a community.

Christopher G. Stanton said:

It doesn't make sense to purposefully restrict participation using the permissions to only members, only to then decide to change that to every user.

This is just an example of what can be done, but is probably not as unheard of as you might think.  A more common scenario is to do the reverse, to allow membership but further restrict.  So you may have a group where you want people to join but they cannot post, in which case they are still members, but would have no new button.   

Christopher G. Stanton said:

Which is weird, because I would have expected the experience to be to show these things as a 'call to action' and then prompt the user to join the group

While technically possible this is where the idea of forcing membership using the content creation flow does not necessarily work because that creation is not based on membership.  You could end up with a result where the button is clicked, the user joins, and the next thing they receive is an Access denied message. This would end up not improving the experience at all.  

The goal is here is to explain why the content creation controls hide as they do and why the  better solution is as directed, you can customize the theme or the widget to make Join more prominent.