I tried both IE and FF…

Sunny

It’s kind of like when the cell phone carriers give the best deals to new clients.

Ehh… whadaya gonna do?

Good post. I like it.

You forgot to mention the grievous sin of making the username fields to small to hold a username of any length. Again, arrgh! It’s not like the Elance form (top) didn’t have enough room to do it, either.

I agree with your point about LinkedIn treating existing users like chopped liver. (Or maybe like “insiders” who are supposed to know their way around.) I understand the need for making things very easy for new people signing up, but they could improve their form tremendously by at least making the “Already on LinkedIn? _Sign_In_” link a lot bigger. (I’d probably miss noticing it.)

They could make the whole thing a little tabbed form with “Join”/”Sign In” tabs at the top. I’ll even let them show “Join” by default. Nicer still if they cookie me, and when I come back it can be on “Sign In” by default.

I can tell you what I would do on the LinkedIn form, as a user: I’d probably enter my info to sign in, and click “Continue”, only to discover that was the wrong thing to do, and have to start over.

Like Steve Krug, who has said he can’t remember his way around a site, and has to figure out the navigation all over again each time he visits, I can be dense that way. If I can screw it up as a user, I probably will. That’s probably why I got into the darned field, so I could make everything easier for *me*.

On your Jibber Jobber login I would:
- Give less relative visual weight to the field labels, and more to the fields themselves, making them more welcoming. They look crowded and small, like it would be difficult to type in them. (I know that doesn’t make any rational sense, but who’s being rational?)
- Make the top red bar/button look more button-like (with an “>>”, underlined text, and/or graphic effect like shininess). To me it looks like a heading (like “Join LinkeIn Today”) associated with the signin form below, so that looks like it’s the place to “Get Free Account.”
- An invitation to “Sign In” would help there, too. Maybe on the button, instead of “Go”?

There y’ go. My $0.02. and worth maybe twice that.

Linda