During the design phase of Composers' Village I devised a database schema for the musical data consisting of three CCK types: Villager, Tune, and Project. The reason for the Villager type was to contain a user's musical information, e.g., what Tunes they had contributed in a way that could persist after that user's account had been deleted. I basically wanted the database to stay consistent and well-linked even after a contributing user left and their account was deleted.

The difficulty of this design was that in early implementations the first thing a user had to do after setting up their account information was go to Create content and make a VIllager to represent themselves musically. It would hold a text blurb which was their musical bio but was mostly an empty container for information about any future musical contributions to Composers' Village. This was a usability problem because it was a real nuisance to have to go through this extra step when joining Composers' Village.

So I realized that the Villager for a user had to be created automatically for them when the account was made. In the Getting started page I could explain how to fill out the musical bio after creating account but having to teach the new user how to create an instance of Villager, as well, was definitely too much.