Form for creating/inviting new users

Question

What I would like to achieve?

A form that enables a user creating a group of people on my website. Now: not every member of that group needs to be active (in other words: not every member needs to have an account on my website). You can think about it as representation of a family: adult members can have accounts but I let's say that I also want toddlers in my system and they won't have accounts.

So I need to give a user possibility to:

• invite other people by providing email addresses
• create inactive 'users' in the system only by entering a name

Please also note that it can be purely random fact that some users are 'inactive' (only with name) and others are active - for example it is possible that inviting user forgot (or doesn't have) email address of certain person so she/he provides only a name.

I am not sure how to create such a form... I think that it should be one view where I'm asking about those emails or names. Should I provide two fields (textareas), in one a user can provide email addresses and in another one a user can enter names of 'inactive users'? Something like this:

Do you think that this is good solution? Im worried that it can a bit confusing for users. Are those two textareas connected? Should I provide name for every email? and so on...

Answer 1

I do not agree with 2 different text fields. If both fields are going to perform the same action then it is better to have one single field.

The best example of similar implementation would Gmail's recipient field (Check image)

So I would suggest something similar. Email invites can be displayed as the 1st option ([email protected]) in the image. While Inactive user would be displayed as the 2nd option (Nikhil Jadhav)

Plus the advantage to this would be that people are used to such email recipient field behavior.

Answer 2

Your proposed UI feels a little confusing. I will say that the little "x" next to the names is a nice feature, I would keep that.

First, you're missing the ability to name the group that the user is associating these users with, I would start there. A single text input with a label would suffice.

Next, you want to provide a way to add a user to the group. Instead of trying to make this a batch operation (multiple users at once), I would make it a singular operation (add one user at a time). That is, I would use single text input where they type the name/email of the person they want to add to the group. That input could behave as an auto-complete style search field. As the user types, it would search for users with the email and/or name the user is actively typing. Once they've entered the complete name/email, they could click and 'Add' button.

Clicking the 'Add' button would update a third area (not a textarea) where you could show users that already exist in that group. This is where I'd keep your existing functionality of showing the users in the group with a simple 'x' next to them that removes them from the group.