Featuring the referring site's logo and name more prominently in Discourse ID

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

I’ve just been setting up a new self-hosted site utilising Discourse ID.

So good to no longer have to wrangle with Facebook et al to get social logins to work!!!

When testing this with local logins turned off, I’ve noticed that it isn’t visually obvious that new users are in the correct place.

Whilst present, our logo and site name are not visually prominent. The logo is small, and the logo / site name are on the same line as the other text:

This visually downplays our site quite a bit at the most critical time for new users, and will likely confuse many of them.

I think it might be much better if the site logo and name where at least as prominent as the Discourse ID one, and placed visually so they seem like equal partners.

[pmusaraj (Penar Musaraj)]

We’re open to adjustments, but I’m not quite sure how we could make this more obvious. Some visuals/mockups would be nice.

[asc]

To me there’s two issues: 1) it’s not clear what image/title combo is being pulled for use on the Discourse ID page, and 2) the Discourse ID logo is much larger and more prominent than the referring site logo, so to a user unfamiliar with Discourse, it looks like they’re being sent to a completely different, unaffiliated site.

This is the Discourse ID page coming from my installation:

I have all my title info filled out in admin settings, and I don’t have all logo file uploads uploaded, but I have everything in the Logo section that says that it’s used to generate other images if they’re not present. But I still have a generic logo and title, and the page makes it look like I’m making an account just with Discourse. (Yes, using Discourse ID means making a Discourse ID account, but for a user who has no other discourse accounts and is unfamiliar with the concept of a site running software but being its own thing, this looks like being sent to wordpress.com to make an account when they want to leave a blog comment somewhere).

Something like this below, where the Discourse ID logo is much smaller and the referring site logo and name are larger and more prominent makes it clearer that Discourse ID is more like the incidental key, not the site the user will be using.

The verification emails kind of have the same problem, but I don’t know how easy those are to change–when making a Discourse ID account and then opening the verification email, a new user lands back at id.discourse.com, not at the referring forum they were trying to make an account at. For a user unfamiliar with discourse, this just looks like spam or they got routed wrong, and they have to navigate back to the referring forum and manually log in there. If there were a way to include a link back to the referring forum after verification, that would remove a lot of friction from the signup/onboarding process.