CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

First off, CiviCRM is awesome!  I am so thankful for this product and what it has enabled our organization to do.  I recently walked through using CiviContribute with one of our constituents and got some good feedback and thought I should share it:

1. For recurring transaction directions: Put a "*" next to installments or use some other method in order to more clearly indicate that leaving it blank will result in endless recurrence.  This section has a lot of text.  People don't like to read all of it at once.

2. Have an example of what to type in the boxes during a recurring transaction (the user had trouble understanding if they should type "One" or "1" in the frequency field.  Hard to believe, but true.

Thanks for the continued improvement and hard work.

I thought of one more feature that I forgot to mention from my user feedback last night:

+ The user wanted a way to select a start date.  I could not see a way for them to do that, neither could they.  So now they have to log back in on the day they want to do the donation each month.

-----

I was on the demo site today and saw some other recurring donation pages.  I think I realized part of the confusion is the frequency field itself. I realized I can turn off the "frequency" field and that might be a good thing to clear up the clutter, but then the options are more limited (for example I couldn't donate once every two weeks, as my paychecks come).

Perhaps a better way to have a frequency would be to limit the interface a bit to some realistic values and present them in a select form field like:

One time donation
Once a week
Every two weeks
Every four weeks
Once a month
Every three months
Every six months
Once a year


Right before this select field could then be a date box with a calendar icon for a user to select a date.  Perhaps the date box could be "greyed" out so that they MUST click on the icon to select a date.  That date would be the first date to start the donation on.

After the frequency selection, if they selected a recurring donation frequency a box could show up to type the end-date in the same manner they selected the start date, but also be able to leave it blank to have it open-ended.

Mockup 1:

+---------------------------+----------------------+------------------------+
| Start Date [         ] [ICON] | [One time donation \/] | End Date [      ] [ICON] |
+---------------------------+----------------------+------------------------+
| Donation date                   | Payment frequency     | Final Donation date       |
+---------------------------+----------------------+------------------------+


Mockup 2:

+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| Start Date [         ] [ICON]    | Donation date                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| [One time donation \/      ]    | Payment frequency               |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| End Date [      ] [ICON]         | Final Donation date               |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+


I will try to run this by my test user to see what she thinks.