4 ms·
This idea of a not forcing users to create accounts to use your product is pretty much the default these days, but five years ago I'd never seen it done. Durin
by jasonkester 14y ago
This idea of a not forcing users to create accounts to use your product is pretty much the default these days, but five years ago I'd never seen it done.
During the first day of having Twiddla exposed to the world, I added a no-signup option as an afterthought and watched traffic our demo usage simply explode. Here's the writeup:
http://www.twiddla.com/blog/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one.html http://www.twiddla.com/blog/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one....
So the short answer is yes. This same lesson has been learned over and over again by hundreds of companies since then. At this point, it's not worth even giving thought to. Do it if you can.
- eshvk 14y agoYour reasoning makes complete sense to me from a UX perspective. However, how does a company get any sort of demographic information if they can't track the user reliably? Apart from all the evil reasons to do that, there must be some critical places where user data helps in making a product better.
- jasonkester 14y agoThink about the alternatives you're comparing: [Frictionless]: cookie + record in the database + random userid [ForcedAccountCreation]: cookie + record in the database + arbitrary username + meaningless passwordhash I can't think off hand of any advantage the things in that second list give you that you can't get from the things in the first one.
- eshvk 14y agoI will be the first one to admit that I don't know participate in the date aggregation point of the pipeline so my knowledge is rusty. Say one was designing a system where age, sex information was important. How do you keep track of this information: 1. Across multiple computers that the person might be using? 2. Expiring cookies? Thanks