Best signup is no signup
What is one thing you need in order to create a new account for your user? Email. That's it. You don't need to ask for first and last, DOB, passwords, street address or nick names. At least, not right away.
Yet, countless of online services (hell, mine including) insist on asking those premature questions as each new undecided and puzzled user wanders in and decides to try them out. Long form, consent to Tc&Cs and a big fat signup button are still a prevailing recipe for registration. Ban unregistered from any solid functionality. Show off what your site can do & magnetize visitors to the big signup banner. Roll out a long registration form asking to understand, trust and care enough to fill it out and convert.
Registration form usability, or rather lack of it, has been part of this game for so long we kept accepting it as a fact of nature. Even a 5% success ratio on a signup form seemed reasonable to ask for.
Having just finished Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design*, which talks a lot about signup usability, I've turned a big believer of the "best signup is no signup" motto. True. It is slightly exaggerated. End of a day, you need at least that email address to fully "capture" your user. Still, idealistic vision of - no signup required - keep me motivated to get there one day.
I've done a quick research and here some startups that put traditional signup model upside down:
- posterous.com (Blogging service. Email your first blog post to post@posterous.com and you're done)
- szerlok.pl (Polish classifieds site. Don't want to create a permanent account? No issue, publish your ad, but before it gets online, you need to click an authorization link in your mailbox, this way you can use the site and publish on a regular basis without having to create an account at all.)
- nozbe.com (Productivity tool. Asking 2 most basic questions: name & email. Hit enter, you get email with a confirmation link. Click the link and then set your password. By avoiding password and re-enter password fields on the first signup screen Nozbe improved the signup conversion by high margin.)
- tripit.com (Itinerary planner. Just forward your travel itinerary to tripit's generic email. Tripit will do the rest. You get the return email with a link to your tripit page. And yes, when you go there, you get to see an account creation page, but it's all optional, you can skip it and use tripit loginless.)
Registration usability. What can you do to enable a more user friendly (and successful) signup?
- Cut out all the fat from your standard signup form. Really. You need nothing else but the email field. You can ask for other details like name, DOB etc after the user clicks on the confirmation link.
- If you do require additional information from your user - break up your form into a number of steps. Make it fun and informal. Good example is displaying a % of profile completeness or handing out some perks for users who fill out all details.
- Evolve the old model of account holder / not account holder. Introduce an in-between state: tester/user (even a permanent tester, sometimes). Szerlok.pl strategy
- Adopt someone elses platform to capture your users. Facebook connect, Twitter, Google etc.
- Let your visitors experience full funcionality of the service before they officially signup.
- Use email extensively. People live in their email. Use it to confirm user's action online, use it to send a pre-generated password, use it as a signup platform - Posterous case.
- Don't ask to create password right away. Wait till the user clicks on the email confirmation link. Or just send him a pre-generated, but friendly sounding password.
- Rely on other mechanisms to welcome & recognize your users (cookies, unique browser settings combination). Sure it's not 100% accurate, but maybe it will do the trick. You can always resort to "Click here if not Maciek" functionality.
- Clearly state out benefits of registration on the signup form.
- If you are asking for password, don't go overboard with your security requirements. Do you really need a 7digit alphanumeric format?
- Use lazy signup strategy. Don't make your users think they're actually signing up. Devise the alternative signup path and ask for email as part of some other procedure on your site. At pstro.pl we have two signup paths. One is on the actual registration page. There we ask for email, password (and other redundant details which we'll remove soon). The other one - used way more often - is part of a write review page. We just stuck the email field to the review form. After user submits the review, she'll get email with authorization link, after clicking on the link, the review gets published and the user gets official email notyfing her that the account was created and what her temporary password is.
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*Make sure you read this chapter from Luke's book about signup forms.
4 comments
Apr 19, 2010
Michael Sliwinski said...
I'm obsessed about making the signup form as easy and quick as possible. Just visited Foursquare and their signup form threw me off.... Gowalla does it better.Thanks for mentioning Nozbe's signup form. I'm actually building a new service where the signup form will be just an email address. That's it. The rest will be populated by the user down the road... in small steps :-)
Jun 22, 2010
Chris Lorensson said...
Hi Maciek - excellent write-up. As they say, usability is the study of the obvious. I was looking for ages for a write-up just like this... you nailed it dude. Well done.Chris
