Impact of Removing Registration

In Sign Up Forms Must Die, I advocated ways to get people engaged and interested in Web applications and services without requiring an explicit sign-up form. In many cases, registration is an obstacle that prevents people from exploring and engaging with an application.

Since then, several people have asked what the impact of removing registration would be on content quantity (does removing sign-up forms increase participation) and content quality (will quality go down if registration is not required). Not too long ago, the community news site, Topix published details behind their experience killing sign-up forms.

The results?

• Since removing registration, volume has exploded and passed a quarter-of-a-million aggregate posts
• And the quality of posts? The post kill-rate (removal) actually dropped -hovering below 2%. This is less than half of the number incurred when registration was in place.

| Tags: forms, balance, metrics | TrackBacks: 0

10% Sign up Improvement with one Change

Marcello Calbucci recently shared some details behind the design of the Sampa sign up form. Sampa is a free Web site service that requires users to register before they set up a site and saw a 10% increase in sign-ups with one change: removing CAPTCHA.

• The Sampa sign in form has been through 4 or 5 different versions
• At one point Sampa asked about 15 questions
• ampa A/B tested several sign up form scenarios over the last 2 years to determine the right combination that yields maximum conversion and retention
• CAPTCHA was used to prevent automated bots from creating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts
• Sampa removed CAPTCHA 99% of the time through a set of tests and rules
• The result: 9.2% improvement on our conversion rate

| Tags: forms, Web conventions, metrics | TrackBacks: 1

Web Symposium: Web Form Design Best Practices

| Tags: forms, guidelines, interaction design, visual communication, usability, UI components | TrackBacks: 0

Gourmet Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget

In his Cooking up Gourmet Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget keynote at the Higher Education Web Symposium in Philadelphia, PA Jared Spool discussed it takes to make great experiences without a big budget.

• What is behind a gourmet experience: meticulous preparation, quality ingredients, and a creative approach.
• How do the best teams create design? Jared researched teams that delivered great designs and teams that tried to deliver great designs but failed. All the usability issues they found could be traced to someone missing key pieces of information. As a result, these people were not able to make appropriate decisions.
• Every usability problem comes from decisions made without the right information.
• A process is a series of steps to get something done. Everyone has a process. A methodology is a formalization of process that is enforced when we need other people to the same thing, multiple times. Dogma is an unquestioned faith independent of any supporting evidence.
• When Jared began his research on design teams, he suspected there was a good methodology or dogma that every organization worked with to achieve consistently great results. It turned out the opposite was true.
• Very few teams had methodology or dogma. Instead, all successful teams had techniques and techniques.
• Techniques are the building blocks of a process. They need to be practiced in order to be mastered and require trial and error. Tricks are quick and easy and perhaps not the best way of doing things but they “just get things done”.
• Best teams did not have a methodology or dogma, but everyone had techniques and tricks that the whole team knew.
• Three core User experience attributes: vision, feedback, and culture.
• Vision: can everyone on the team describe your vision five years from now? Where will your product be?
• Feedback: in the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your or a competitor’s design?
• Culture: In the last six weeks, have your rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? Every time there is a design problem, we learn something about users, their needs, and what we should be doing for them.
• Meticulous Preparation: identify if your pages quickly communicate their purpose.
• Quality ingredients: make sure you have content that matters to people.
• Creative approach: look for opportunities to get things to work.

| Tags: design organizations, process, user experience | TrackBacks: 0

Product Manager's Dreams

| Tags: design vision | TrackBacks: 0

Sign-Up Form Patterns

Though, I've long advocated that Sign-Up Forms Must Die, for now they remain a staple of online life. Recently Smashing Magazine surveyed the landscape of sign-up forms by looking at patterns in 100 popular Web destinations and their registration forms . The data they extracted is a catalog of existing practices and as a result should not be considered design recommendations. However, it is interesting to see these trends and ultimately if they change over time.

• the registration link is most often titled “sign up” (40%) and placed in the right upper corner of a landing page
• registration forms tend to opt for a simplified layout to avoid distractions for users (61%)
• most registration forms are one-page-forms (93%)
• registration forms attract visitors by explaining the benefits of signing up (41%), 28% provide no additional information about benefits
• titles of the input fields are highlighted bold (62%), rendered in color (20%), or plain text (18%)
• right-aligned labels are used on 41% os registration forms surveyed, 30% used top-aligned labels, 29% use left-aligned labels
• 54% of the forms surveyed required at most 5 input fields, 34% of the forms required 6-8 input fields, while 12% required over 9 mandatory input fields
• 78% do not use asterisks to highlight required input fields
• 62% of the forms had no optional fields at all, and 98% of the forms had less than 5 optional fields
• 9% use a progress indicator to show to the users where they currently are and which steps are required
• 86% of registration forms surveyed have input fields arranged vertically
• 57% of the forms surveyed provided help text next to the input field, 10% of help text appears dynamically
• Help text was most often placed: below the field (57%), on the right side of the field (26%), above the field (13%)
• 30% of the forms surveyed displayed only an error-message at the top of the form (no input fields were highlighted), 29% had highlighted input fields with corresponding messages next to the input field, 25% used both error-messages and input fields
• 22% used real-time validation with Ajax, 14% used JavaScript-error warnings
• Only in 18% of the cases it was necessary to confirm the e-mail
• In 72% of the cases it was necessary to confirm the password
• 52% of the sites don’t use captcha
• A Cancel button was used only in 8% of the cases
• Left-aligned submit-buttons (56%), centered Submit buttons (26%), right-aligned Submit buttons (17%)

• Sign-Up Form Patterns: Part One
• Sign-Up Form Patterns: Part Two

| Tags: forms, Web conventions | TrackBacks: 0

Web Form Design: Goodreads Review

On the Goodreads site, Marty DeAngelo posted a detailed review of my new book Web Form Design:

| Tags: forms, Web applications | TrackBacks: 0

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