If a new Moodle site is set up and it allows self-registration the default settings aren't changed, new users are sent to the Dashboard after they log in. A user who self-registers and then sees the Dashboard doesn't see anything useful because a) they aren't enrolled in anything, and b) there's no way from the dashboard to see what they could do. There isn't a built-in 'list available courses' type block that could be added to the default dashboard. I have to explicitly tell new users Hey, click on the Home link to see the courses, which isn't at all intuitive to them because they regard the page they logged on to as the Home page.
That was probably envisioned as the job of 'Home', but the UI doesn't exactly highlight the fact that Home and Dashboard are different places. Many (many) users get to these screens and if they don't know why they should click on anything then they won't try clicking it for fear of getting lost. Not so bad after a bit of training or guidance, but for 'self-registration' type sites you don't get many opportunities. Perhaps if you are clever, you would set up a user tour to point out where they should be looking to start out - except that Tours don't have a show condition for User who isn't yet enrolled in anything. Again, the out-of-the-box experience means having to know that and then have the skills to set it up.
It's about at this time that I start wishing that new users who aren't enrolled in anything yet would be sent to the Home page after login so they can choose how to start, whereas users who are enrolled already get sent to Dashboard (or in Moodle 4 - My Courses) so they can get on with it - but these things have been in Moodle for donkey's years and it's never been that way, and I'm not even sure a plugin could get in there and change that logic. Plugins have limited access to modifying what can be shown on the homepage, and the 'get home page' logic is hard coded in moodlelib.php and is therefore not touchable by plugins.
In Moodle 4, if courses don't set dates for activities (and there are a lot of valid reasons why courses won't set any dates), the default Dashboard remains empty and useless. Thankfully you can now set the far-more useful 'My courses' page as the default after login.
The out-of-the-box Home page experience also leaves a lot to be desired. Let's say we have a typical (for me) site with 100 courses in deeply nested categories, some of these might be new versions of older courses where some people are still studying the old version and some are studying the new version and as such, they are both listed. Some courses have decent descriptions and teachers, some have varying enrolment methods, some have course images or files and many do not - so it's a bit of a hodge-podge as far as the listing appears. I'm trusting that new users can learn that the little P icon means they could pay for the course, the little arrow icon means they can self enrol, and so on (unless they are on a tablet where tapping these icons does nothing and there is no hover-text like with a mouse). I could set up different listing course-listing-styles on the homepage such as 'Combo list' but then I lose the descriptions and images and listing of teachers - because each of the listing options for the home page and the subsequent course or category listing pages has its own style and set of quirks. Plugins also can't really touch the course listings shown on the homepage [without a LOT of bothersome duplication of protected/private methods in core code]. Themes often go to the trouble of building their own home page experience for onboarding which negates the out-of-the-box model, and may not even be available in many cases such as in Moodle Cloud where you can't even add themes or plugins.
It seems like sites that don't operate date-based courses with users who are manually set up and enrolled just don't get a lot of love or consideration when it comes to the UX. If I have to put up a document/video/front-end/tour describing the onboarding process for new users, then the user interface has failed in its job. Registering as a new user and then being presented with an empty page is bad UX in my book.
This has turned into a bit of rant, but I'm hoping for it to be a discussion, critique or even appropriateness of Moodle on the UX for these types of sites [open registration, user-chosen enrolment, non-date-based courses].
