14 ms·

Stop making me sign up

210 points by fonziguy 13y ago

austenallred 13y ago
As a marketer, I see the temptation. Whether you like it or not, the things that you sign up for are more sticky, regardless of how good the product is. It takes a leap of faith as a marketer to let you see a product without getting a way to get you back first. What marketers need to realize is that if you force people to sign up first they will leave in droves before they have any idea what you've created. I think the optimal landing page is "create an account" with a way to bypass and "see it first."
GVIrish 13y ago
This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the service is and how it works without giving up your contact info. So instead of giving the user a chance to be sold on what you're selling, you've just turned them away before they can even learn what your pitch is. You've killed an opportunity for word of mouth as well. Maybe the idea is to select for users who are so eager to learn about your service that they'll give you their email first. Maybe that kind of customer is worth a lot more money. But I think many people have marketing fatigue at this point, and are only going to sign up for things they know they're interested in. I mean, I wouldn't give my contact info to a store that doesn't even let me into the door until I fork over some info.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the service is and how it works without giving up your contact info. That's because of a truth about the modern Internet, which sounds like an old truism about card-playing: if you can't figure out what the product is, you're the product.
  - GVIrish 13y ago
    I think that's definitely the case with free services. But I've even seen some paid services that pull this trick. Take Frank & Oak for instance. I've seen a lot of ads for them and I have some vague idea that it's a fashion service for men. How does it work? How much does it cost? I have no idea, I have to sign up to figure it out.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > I think that's definitely the case with free services. But I've even seen some paid services that pull this trick. That's because they all want to hook up, maybe sell you something, and avoid a problem with the Can-Spam Act, to wit: if they e-mail you and you're not a customer, they're in violation, it's spam. If you have signed up, you're a customer, so the Can-Spam Act no longer applies -- they can e-mail you all they want. The really sleazy outfits are those that spam you, and include an opt-out link in the spam mailing. You click the link, which takes you to a sign-up page. The idea is, if you sign up, what you got isn't spam any more -- by signing up, you turn it into a legitimate business contact. The fact that the op-out-link goes to a signup page technically violates the Can-Spam Act (which requires that an opt-out procedure be both prominent and simple), but it seems no one cares about that any more.
      - PeterisP 13y ago
        For such "optouts", the "report spam" button works as intended. If I didn't opt-in to the mailings, it's ethically spam (even if I'm your customer), and thus all your emails rightfully should be treated as emails from a known intentional spammer.
        lutusp 13y ago
        That's the way I've always looked at it, but the Can-Spam Act perversely legitimizes what once would have been regarded as spam, and that to many, still is. Also, when people opt-out, what's to stop one business from sharing the addresses of opt-outs with another business, who then can drink from the same well? This is a glaring flaw in Can-Spam commented on by many, and it's why a number of influential organizations argued that it shouldn't have been made into law in the first place: http://www.pcworld.com/article/113137/article.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/113137/article.html Quote: "The Senate unanimously approved the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act last week. It requires e-mail users to opt out of unwanted commercial e-mail, instead of requiring e-mail senders to get permission before sending. That approach is backwards, say vendors of antispam technologies and at least one consumer advocacy group."
- jessep 13y ago
  I'd like to add a little data to this discussion, from the perspective of someone with a minimal landing page that makes you sign up. We (https://workflowy.com https://workflowy.com) built a try-first sign up flow, and a/b tested it against our current minimal signup page, which is a lot like those you describe. Unfortunately, the try-first performed FAR worse. Not only did we get fewer signups (which we expected). The engagement rate for users who had tried first was significantly LOWER. Exact same product. Same first time experience. One group tried before signing up, the other didn't. They liked it less. Isn't that odd? From my understanding, other services have experienced this same phenomenon. Why does this happen? It is hard to explain. It could be some aspect of our try-first design was flawed. But, my guess is that it's something psychological about signing up. I had expected and hoped that the try-first flow would improve word of mouth. I think many do. But it didn't. So I'd encourage as many people to bring data to the table as possible. I've found through doing tons of a/b tests that metrics often don't obey my logic.
  - teleclimber 13y ago
    Fascinating. Thanks for sharing your data. There is something about having to put in a little effort up front, and giving up a little, that commits a user to try harder to use a service. I wonder if this phenomenon is a cousin of the well known characteristic that non-paying users tend to be more demanding and less appreciative of a given service than those who pay (premium users).
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing the information. I guess you are right, it is psychological. It is possible that two reasons contribute: time investment in the sign up that increases the value of the service and feeling of having personal space on the website.
  - GVIrish 13y ago
    One key difference with what you've done though, is that through a link on the bottom I can at least figure out what your product does and see a sample workflow. Some of these sign up landing pages have nothing in the way of explaining what something is. But maybe what companies are finding is that people respond more strongly when details are withheld from them.
lutusp 13y ago
Quote: "99% of sites/apps/services we visit now make you register and go through an on-boarding process before getting to the meat of the product." That's because signing up is the product. The touted "product" is a fiction, a pander to get you to sign up. Another way to say this is you are the product, the advertised "product" is just bait to lure you in. If you haven't signed up and the company e-mails you, they're in violation of the Can-Spam Act. Once you've signed up, you become a customer, a category excluded from the sanctions of the Can-Spam Act. So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the only thing. I wish people who wrote articles like the linked one actually knew something -- that might make their articles worth reading.
- codegeek 13y ago
  "So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the only thing." Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not. If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up? If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want to use your app ? It doesn't. Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying customer or an active user. That is what matters not just a sign-up.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not. It may not matter to you, but it certainly matters to them. If you sign up, you become a customer. > If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up? Try to think like the site operator. They know they don't have anything interesting to offer you, but you certainly have something interesting to offer them: your identity. > If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want to use your app? Who cares? The point is to get you to sign up, reveal your personal information, not to offer you anything useful for your trouble. > Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying customer or an active user. You clearly don't understand how the Can-Spam Act works. The Can-Spam Act doesn't apply to people who are customers, i.e. people who have signed up. So by signing up, you've given permission to be spammed perpetually.
bambax 13y ago
So true; imgur should be mentioned as a service that offers great value without asking you to sign up. I started urgeous.com with the same idea: blogging without signup. It got zero traction and was/is maybe too complex to use as it is but I still believe in the idea! ;-)
- kristopolous 13y ago
  Service works. It's pretty nice. Here's some suggestions: * The <title> tag doesn't get the subject line. * I want a readable url. I would assume that my test url p34t3aaa44n could be a bit simpler. After all, the whole of YouTube is 11 characters. Something like /p34t3a/Title would be awesome. In base64 with 6 digit ids you still have a namespace of 68.7 billion posts. * There should be special markup just for your site. Here's an idea, something like: [theme:moonlight] Look at the nice darkness. * I don't use signatures but many do. This will be a hassle for them. * And finally, choose a different name. As an American at least, "Urgeous" sounds awful. Something more in-tune to what the site is would be great. I spent about 10 seconds doing some whois queries; emailpos.com is closer to what I'd be expecting - and it's available. Smash two words together, drop a vowel; all the cool kids are doing it.
hrvbr 13y ago
Well, I'm building a dating site as a hobby project. I could add a "Just try without an account" option but then, there's still a rather long form to fill to decide who the user should be connected with. Removing only two fields doesn't seem like a very good idea in this case.
jknfrsj 13y ago
Quora.
jneal 13y ago
I very often turn away from sites that ask me to sign up. It doesn't matter how interested I am, if you ask me to sign up without allowing me to see what I came to see, I will go away and forget I ever heard about you.
btoconnor 13y ago
This was a major reason for creating my board game web site, BreakBase ( http://www.breakbase.com http://www.breakbase.com ). All I wanted to do was play a board game against my friend, and not have to worry about all of the nuances of making an account. Just share a link and play a game. Making an account is an after-thought, if you like using the service. edit: hyperlinks, how do they work?
- purplelobster 13y ago
  Just like to say that I love this concept.
state 13y ago
Does anyone else find it ironic that there are so many articles bemoaning the annoyances of web services written on the web service Medium?
- untilHellbanned 13y ago
  good point, but isn't more that the Medium staff, probably all web developers, is highlighting these types of posts? I've written about basketball and other subjects and they literally get 0 views.
marchra 13y ago
HEAR, HEAR! The low point for me experiencing this was a pseudo-startup (really a product review blog) plastering their front page with a mandatory Facebook Connect. No, I think I'll abandon like the other 98% of your HN traffic.
crazygringo 13y ago
Sometimes, yes. But there are a lot of services where you do need an account to try it at all -- how are you going to try out Mint, or Duolingo, or Path, or OkCupid, without creating an account first? Obviously you can create "dummy accounts", but they often won't actually give a decent idea of the site's experience (browsing profiles on OkCupid doesn't give you anywhere near the experience of having people message you), and then how is the person going to convert their dummy account into a real one later on, if they never even put in their e-mail or password? There are certainly plenty of times when sites go overboard in asking too much of you up-front, but it's not always the case.
- fonziguy 13y ago
  Absolutely. I think Chartbeat does a good job of showing you the product before signing up https://chartbeat.com/demo https://chartbeat.com/demo and also https://www.intercom.io/ https://www.intercom.io/ have a great gradual engagement flow (where they actually need data to work effectively).
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I can think of examples of most of those or similar services where either anonymous or test-account demos were available. Which is also, incidentally, a good way to test/check your own code.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tedsanders 13y ago
  Actually, I think OkCupid would be a good candidate for gradual engagement. Letting you browse profiles before creating an account could make it easier to see what sort of people are on the site, what sort of work you'll have to do to write a profile, and generally set your expectations for what it's like to have an account there.
  - jmtame 13y ago
    For this to work, you'd have to let your users opt-in to making their profiles public. Nothing stops a search engine crawler at this stage from caching everything, and most dating site users want their privacy. I don't think this would work.
tarr11 13y ago
Count me as the opposite. I like sites that have lots of screenshots and emails educating me on how something would work before I have to bother using it. I have seen a lot of sites that let me "try before I sign up". More often than not, this gets me caught in the weeds of the product and it feels like work and I get turned off.
xarien 13y ago
Yep, I completely agree. We actually did exactly this (just last week) and created a QR for a live demo on our landing page (www.infoduce.com). This way people can see more than just a screenshot before having to "sign up."
- janjongboom 13y ago
  http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d000019-852-1136/qr%20code%20flow%20chart.jpg http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d0...
  - xarien 13y ago
    It's a hyperlink. Do you use hyperlinks?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - anonymoushn 13y ago
      Are QR codes on business cards actually easier to use than short URLs on business cards?
      - xarien 13y ago
        Sorry about my earlier terse reply. I was a bit short on time. The reference to the hyperlink was meant to be an analogy to QR codes in general which serve as a transportation vehicle akin to hyperlinks. Your question in the ease of using QR codes is actually a great question. What many people find is that while it may not be difficult to type a short link, the act of transcribing it from another source is prone to error and mistakes. The value add in regards to technologies such as QR, NFC, bluetooth etc is that it removes human errors. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of limitations in regards to QR codes as well as other technologies which bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual mediums, but they do serve a specific purpose. At the end of the day, it's really about ROI (very little investment, especially when it comes to QR) and the way they are used.
ig1 13y ago
Users expect to register. I've seen UX lab studies testing it, without registration users get really confused and don't understand what's happening with their data. Conversion can actually drop heavily with non-registration approaches. Obviously it depends on the app, one where you only need to use it once you can and probably should design your UX to not need it. But if your app actually needs to maintain user state over multiple sessions then creating a user makes a lot of sense. (Although you can build up user profile over time rather than requiring it upfront)
yarianluis 13y ago
This article makes points that sound fine on the surface, but ignore reality. There's a very good reason why a lot of sites do this and won't stop any time soon--it works. The article claims some effects to "conversions, usage and how people feel about your product" but is very light on the details of how it actually affects those things. Getting a user to sign up facilitates a whole range of options (promotional emails being just one of them) that help drive user retention and engagement. I am not advocating making your product obscure until they sign up. The value proposition of your product should be clear, regardless of whether someone signs up or not. But it is not clear that making them signup before they can actually use it for themselves decreases conversion or usage. The complaint made here will become ever weaker as "Sign Up with Google" and other single-sign-on services become more widespread. Signing up in those cases takes a single click, and my experience is in many cases instantly personalized with my data from other services. This might make some HN denizens cringe, but the average person seems to not mind.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  I don't understand why the parent is getting downvoted. It is one of the few rational, realistic posts so far in this discussion. [Edit: In the time it took to write this post, a few other people now seem to have expressed similar views.] Of course visitors would rather try everything for free indefinitely and never give anything up in return. That's obvious. On the other hand, in today's world, web sites are often transient things you find via social networks and search engines and visit only briefly the first time. Even if you find a site interesting, if you forget to bookmark it somewhere obvious or you found it at work but get distracted by the time you reach home, you might never think to go back. From the site owner's point of view, if subsequent more deeply engaged visits never happen and they have no way of re-engaging with genuine prospective customers, they could be losing a huge proportion of their potential revenues. There's always a balancing act in these things, trying to demonstrate enough value to a prospect as easily as possible that they engage, yet not giving away so much that they have little incentive to engage and don't see enough extra value to justify becoming a paying customer. Trying to get people to sign up when they don't even know what you do yet is probably not a good strategy, but neither is letting them see so much that they wind up just circulating around your site and never converting. Ultimately, if being a little more aggressive about getting people to the next stage of conversion puts some people off, that's good. Those people probably weren't going to sign up anyway, and all they were doing was wasting your resources and polluting your data about genuine prospects. It sounds harsh and unpleasant to say it so bluntly, but it's probably the reality if you're running a modern commercial site that offers genuine value but isn't an essential service where visitors are certain to come looking again later.
rogerbinns 13y ago
It can cost real money foregone as the $300 million button article showed http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ On the weekend I decided to try some boots from Zappos. They were bought by Amazon 4 years ago, and have "legendary" customer service. Not in my experience. You can login with your Amazon account, but then it asks for your name. Strange. I go to checkout and they want my billing name, street, city, zip, state, same for shipping, card number, expiry, cvc and who knows what else. Turns out that they aren't integrated with Amazon in any meaningful way. I sent them an email about it - maybe I'd missed something. I got some nonsense explanation about it being for my security. Then they started spamming me about the abandoned shopping cart. At this point I discovered that each cs rep has some "humourous" boilerplate about how they are going to help you, before doing something completely unhelpful. They also don't keep track of replies (an id in the subject or just looking at the in-reply-to header would work) so each one starts a new ticket where a different rep doesn't look at the history and does a completely different unhelpful thing. I've now asked 3 times that they delete my account.
- namlem 13y ago
  Wow that's awful. I do hope amazon is working on it. They're usually pretty big on interconnectivity between their services.
spindritf 13y ago
I don't mind that. What bothers me is not knowing what a service actually does. Either no summary on their website, or what is much more common -- in follow-up e-mails. I sign up for a service, or an invite for a service, or even just for a launch announcement, and weeks or months later get an e-mail that makes no mention of what is being touted. But it's a plague in general. It's very common that Wikipedia has better descriptions of companies or software projects, even their commercial offering than the official website. Try looking up which language some piece of software is written in. Often, googling it + github and then clicking on the repo breakdown is the easiest way to find out.
pbreit 13y ago
I suspect we don't hate signing up as much as the OP posits. I particularly dislike the shopping sites such as One Kings Lane that required singnup/login just to browse, but apparently OKL is doing something right since it I believe it's a "leader". On the contrary, Stripe's guest access always struck me as very odd, and unlikely to be copied. For payments, I'd rather go ahead and signup to get my sandbox account.
Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Another potential alternative: local accounts. I worked on a site that's very privacy-oriented and users were still asking for accounts. We didn't want to store their information on our servers. Instead, we use localstorage to keep their settings and a list of things they've uploaded. They don't even have to sign in, and they still get the same experience. Try it: https://mediacru.sh https://mediacru.sh It obviously won't work for everyone, but if you just want to offer users a means to keep track of what they've been doing on your site, consider going locally.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Have you had any issues with folks who switch browsers or computers not seeing their localstorage (which doesn't sync/migrate, IIRC)? I suppose highly-privacy-oriented users would prefer it that way...
  - Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
    Sorry for the late response - the answer is no. We haven't received any complaints yet. However, we don't have the greatest of followings, so there aren't a lot of users to complain to us.
chermanowicz 13y ago
someone should send this to Quora
ryandrake 13y ago
I think Apple's app review guidelines help somewhat in this regard. They specifically forbid apps from requiring registration in order to work. I have had several apps rejected for this reason, and am now careful to always offer a path into apps that can be taken without signing up for an account. Of course, they seem to enforce this irregularly, but at least their policy indicates they seem get it.
- king_magic 13y ago
  My home/lifestyle social networking app for iOS, Let's Go Home (https://letsgohomeapp.com https://letsgohomeapp.com), requires sign up to work. So do Facebook, Twitter, Path, and dozens of other apps.
- ripter 13y ago
  iPhone apps that require me to signup or log into Facebook quickly get deleted.
patio11 13y ago
"If we use gradual engagement, we will have more, higher quality signups" is a testable hypothesis. It has been tested, by many companies. I regret that I am not at liberty to disclose most specific results, but gradual engagement is really tricky to pull off well, and has often roundly failed compared to the traditional get-their-email-first signup screen. This is true even at companies which don't do anything very sophisticated with the email address once they have it, which is (IMHO) generally a mistake in the sort of markets I usually work in. The one product I can talk about: Back in the day, Bingo Card Creator had one-click guest accounts. Their conversion rate was 2. Not two percent. Two. Ever. They were a cause of a stupendous portion of my support burden. (From the perspective of most of my users gradual engagement means "The Googles ate my work and now you have ruined the day of a room full of third graders, you monster.") The engineering to support them was fiddly, and ripping it out made the application better. (Despite several attempts to improve them I don't think I ever had near the UX work invested to make the experience not be awful. Again, gradual engagement UX is quite challenging. In particular, the handoff between guest accounts and "real" trial accounts is of paramount importance to my business but is meaningless to customers who have guest accounts until they get to school, at which point they will often discover, to their surprise, that failing to make the decision yesterday to give me their email address now means their cards are totally inaccessible. I never successfully figured out a way -- copy, design, workflow, etc -- to avoid having huge numbers of people fail at this use case.) Discontinuing guest accounts increased signups of "real" accounts and also sales, if I remember correctly. You can eyeball the signup graph here http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-day http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-day Apologies in advance for the unclear axes -- that page hasn't had the underlying code updated in years, and I didn't even consider "Hey if I run this business for forever eventually that axis is going to get crowded."
- nostromo 13y ago
  I think most of this anti-registration sentiment is coming from places like Quora which force you to register for no good reason, not sites that have a valid reason for an account. (I've never heard someone complain about needing to sign up to use Amazon.) GlassDoor is particularly obnoxious (as I just found out yesterday). If you click on this link http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm all data will show. If you click almost any link or simply refresh the page, it's all hidden, blurred, and you get greeted with an overlay saying you must sign up.
pjbrunet 13y ago
I totally agree. Save to temporary cookies, let me try it. If I want to continue using the product, ask for my email. That's it.
- Simple1234 13y ago
  Indeed. Now that a lot of sites allow you to sign up with Facebook, I use my fake Facebook account almost as much as my real one.
olegp 13y ago
We tried this with the web app launcher at https://starthq.com https://starthq.com. Visitors could create their app launcher before signing up. It did not work as expected as users were confused and few completed the process. Right now we ask for the email up front, but don't demand that the email is verified by clicking the link we send them. This works much better and we're seeing more than two thirds of the users coming back after the initial visit.
gfodor 13y ago
"Stop making testable claims without evidence." "Stop making absolute claims about things that may only be true sometimes." "Stop assuming what frustrates you frustrates everyone." "Stop thinking that other people cannot see 'obvious' design flaws like you can and didn't think through the tradeoffs involved."
couchdive 13y ago
Hey, if you don't use our product, At least we can sell your data!
shurcooL 13y ago
What can I say, it's a good point. 500px does this nicely by giving you an anon user account on your first visit, and you can use the site in full that way. If you prefer to "sign up" and keep your stuff, it can be done.
josephlord 13y ago
I suppose for me there are several categories. 1) If other data or significant user input of any sort is required or possible get a log in so that progress can be recovered. Shopping is probably an exception, I don't generally want an account just to buy the thing. 2) If it is a webservice or API or something similar I won't sign up generally until I have seen a) the pricing b) some documentation and c) had the option to review the terms of service. Going back to an earlier post today about improper use of Google's maps API. Don't hide your sales information (and that includes technical documentation) behind a sign in without a good reason. 3) In some cases I understand the the email address and permission to send me further marketing is the price of access to some information. I understand this and if the offer is good enough I may expect although I will probably decline four out of five times.
lg 13y ago
I hate creating new accounts with passwords, etc but I don't mind "sign in with facebook/google/something most people already have".
- jasomill 13y ago
  And I feel exactly the opposite, because, while I don't use Facebook or stay logged in to a Google account, I do use a password manager.
snarfy 13y ago
This is why I'll never try feedly.com. What is it? What does it do? Without giving them sign up information, I'll never know.
- DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
  Would you mind if I shamelessly plugged my creation here? --SHAMELESS PLUG FOLLOWS-- @updt_me is an RSS reader/Twitter bot that allows you to 'read your feeds' via Twitter DMs. Any and all updates to blogs/feeds you follow are sent to you via twitter DM. There is no signup; just a twitter follow. Because DM. I am currently using it to follow known infrequent/irregular blogs & feeds like xkcd, smbc, etc. In case you are still reading this, the bot is [@updt_me](http://twitter.com/updt_me http://twitter.com/updt_me). There's also a basic microsite up at: http://update-me.herokuapp.com http://update-me.herokuapp.com Could you let me know what you think? Thanks, in advance!
mikejarema 13y ago
Great example of try first, signup later that I coincidentally just discovered is Litmus' email rendering preview system - https://litmus.com/email-testing https://litmus.com/email-testing They go quite far with it, which was really nice for my specific use case, allowing me to share the results with my team before proceeding with registration. Now it begs the question whether or not I'll come back later to signup for the service, but regardless they've left a fantastic impression on me as a potential future user.
jurassic 13y ago
If I recall, Pandora has a relatively gentle onboarding. You can start a new station without being logged in and it's not until you interact with the site further (to rate, skip, etc) that they start pester you to sign up. I don't know how their conversion rates are, but I appreciated being allowed to at least get a brief feel for it before handing over my contact info.
dools 13y ago
We implemented this with Decal about year ago with an online tour that requires no signup[1]. We initially had an online tour which not only required signup but verified your email. Not only did this mean fewer people would try it out, but it meant we got a great deal of disposable emails. Our motivation was obvious: we wanted the free tour to get leads. Each time someone created an account to test, some resources were consumed so we needed to make sure we got a "high value" lead with a valid email. When I watched Kevin Hale's Mixergy interview he talks about the fact that when they first launched the idea of Wufoo on their blog particletree they didn't even have a backend. It just demonstrated to people what it was like to use. We were inspired by that when creating our own tour and we created a way to communicate the benefits our product offers for both deployment and end user interface in a frontend application that requires no signup or account creation. Interestingly, not only do we get a better quality of email now, but about 50% of people who take the tour, put their email address in even though we only ask for it at the end. [1]http://www.decalcms.com/ http://www.decalcms.com/
- brentisx 13y ago
  I'm not sure I understand why you would require an email to see a product tour???? I've reread your post 2x and it is not clear. If this is the case, I agree - bad idea. Another thing you can do as incremental is provide dummy data or fixed queries which give them a taste of the UI but not with their data.
bryanp123 13y ago
Totally agree with this article! There are very few instances where a signup is mandatory to "test the waters". At the very least you should be able to observe(not participate) an app/site/whatever without having to give credentials. Every time I make something new, whether for myself or for work, conversion is the very first though. How can I eliminate text inputs, make less required, or eliminate them all together until the user feels it is worth their time to actually sign up? This is the question everyone creating these sites should ask. It's incredibly frustrating to make it half way through the hoops on some promising website or app only to be confronted with the "sign up now" to get what you actually came here for in the first place and wasted 30 minutes creating, oh and where's your credit card? You can shove that right up your ass, i'm out, oh and pissed. How this works is beyond me. I'd rather spend a week, month, year whatever making something better for myself than be bullied into signing up for your crap app.
alexvr 13y ago
Like nearly everyone else, I despise going through the registration process on every site I try. But certain applications simply don't work without registration. Actually, lots of applications don't. I recently started working on a tiny web app (http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer) that lets you find your computer if it's lost or stolen, and by its very nature it's quite useless if you can't log in to see your device's location (and it's absurdly revealing if you alternatively display a page with thousands of names and corresponding coordinates). Since many sites simply wouldn't work without registration, I propose that we make registration more painless (maybe get rid of the whole email requirement and instead delete accounts that don't verify with email if they are clearly spammers or inactive) or, when a registration-free trial is not viable due to the nature of the application, we could design sites with a demo feature or demo video.
jpalomaki 13y ago
Instead of abandoning the registration, maybe it could be streamlined to make it easier for the user. In many cases it would be enough to just ask for user's email address. Giving just some email address would allow me in to service and I could start using it. On the background the system would send me the standard welcome message via email, but that would not require any immediate action from my behalf. If I decided to become a regular user, I could then setup my password on the service. Maybe the system could point out in the UI that I'm not yet fully registered. In case I forgot the whole thing and tried to use the same email to log on the service next week, the service would remind me that this email is already in use and ask me to go through the verification process to setup a password.
educating 13y ago
The best way to stop making people sign up is to have a universal authentication method that is trusted and used by everyone. I don't believe we'll see a good one in our lifetime. But, that would stop an involved sign-up process.
mugiltsr 13y ago
If you are not making sign-up mandatory, you would not be able to validate the pain point of the problem. People normally would give you their email address(or even pay through their credit card) if you are solving burning problem for them. For self funded start-ups, this may not work. However, this technique discussed in the article may work for consumer start-ups where you think of making money later and your present problem is to get millions of users.I assume you have sufficient runway(could be in the form of venture funding) to follow this approach.
- tchock23 13y ago
  Exactly - if someone won't even register to create an account, there is almost zero chance they are going to fork over their credit card info at some point in the future. Asking for registration validates they will take some small step toward becoming a customer.
voidgmr 13y ago
This is the reason I started working on Streme (http://streme.co http://streme.co). I just wanted to be able to collaborate on a list of links (for sharing music recommendations with my brother) without needing to register for something and then also without having to convince him to register as well.
sspiff 13y ago
2013 and we still haven't really gotten to a good, universal single-sign on system. OpenID seemed like it was going to get us there (at least to me), but nowadays many sites moved away in favour of Google or Facebook or Twitter specific logins, often asking for a little more rights than I'm comfortable giving them. Still, anything is better than signing up to a site with a username and password, and receiving a mail with your account info in plain text. Since the LinkedIn and Twitter hacks, I've lost faith in the backend developers to treat the storage of account info with the respect they deserve. (at least use a hash and a unique salt per user...)
- quadrangle 13y ago
  The solution is already here but is still beta: Mozilla Persona (previously known as browserid)
  - sspiff 13y ago
    Interesting, I hadn't seen Persona before (I associated it with their previous "Firefox Persona" skinning system.
sebastianconcpt 13y ago
I understand the motivation for promiscuous early adopters but what's the motivation for the business? If your business implement this strategy, you're relinquishing (in exchange of nothing) to the benefit of user retention created by the loss aversion bias and sense of belonging that the "harder" conversion has generated.
hmans 13y ago
"Stop making me sign up. [...] Discuss this on Hacker News."
giociferri 13y ago
Very nice article Lee! I think that we need to reimagine the way we catch our users because many people hate to have to register to try a product.
afonsopraca 13y ago
That's It!
coreyward 13y ago
Users are currency in the business of the web, and until putting a 5+ digit number of signups in your deck is ineffective, we'll optimize for the collection of email addresses over engagement.
brentisx 13y ago
Umm.. you are missing a huge part of the psychology behind incremental buy-in. Think about it a bit. If someone let you test drive a Ferrari for a year would you ever be inclined to buy it? Why right. But if you had 20 friends tell you something is amazing and you should buy it and you will be amazed, chances are you will be intrigued and much more likely to put your money down. SaaS/cloud products are much harder to sell IMO than downloadable software too. We used to use the analogy that if someone is downloading your software we are getting an invitation into someone's front door to sell them on the product's virtues. With SaaS, the sales scenario is kin to trying to sell via product display in a crowded mall. Sensory overload with too many different options to distract someone's attention.
belmontjones 13y ago
Slows development end of story. Since the dawn of the library people liked to be able to browse freely!!! meaning they could pick up and put down knowledge at will. Think to the shitty D&D movie and how the thieves want to sneak into the mages horde of knowledge and what a shitty hitty world that was

210 points by fonziguy 13y ago

As a marketer, I see the temptation. Whether you like it or not, the things that you sign up for are more sticky, regardless of how good the product is. It takes a leap of faith as a marketer to let you see a product without getting a way to get you back first. What marketers need to realize is that if you force people to sign up first they will leave in droves before they have any idea what you've created. I think the optimal landing page is "create an account" with a way to bypass and "see it first."

GVIrish 13y ago

This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the service is and how it works without giving up your contact info. So instead of giving the user a chance to be sold on what you're selling, you've just turned them away before they can even learn what your pitch is. You've killed an opportunity for word of mouth as well. Maybe the idea is to select for users who are so eager to learn about your service that they'll give you their email first. Maybe that kind of customer is worth a lot more money. But I think many people have marketing fatigue at this point, and are only going to sign up for things they know they're interested in. I mean, I wouldn't give my contact info to a store that doesn't even let me into the door until I fork over some info.

lutusp 13y ago
> This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the service is and how it works without giving up your contact info. That's because of a truth about the modern Internet, which sounds like an old truism about card-playing: if you can't figure out what the product is, you're the product.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  I think that's definitely the case with free services. But I've even seen some paid services that pull this trick. Take Frank & Oak for instance. I've seen a lot of ads for them and I have some vague idea that it's a fashion service for men. How does it work? How much does it cost? I have no idea, I have to sign up to figure it out.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > I think that's definitely the case with free services. But I've even seen some paid services that pull this trick. That's because they all want to hook up, maybe sell you something, and avoid a problem with the Can-Spam Act, to wit: if they e-mail you and you're not a customer, they're in violation, it's spam. If you have signed up, you're a customer, so the Can-Spam Act no longer applies -- they can e-mail you all they want. The really sleazy outfits are those that spam you, and include an opt-out link in the spam mailing. You click the link, which takes you to a sign-up page. The idea is, if you sign up, what you got isn't spam any more -- by signing up, you turn it into a legitimate business contact. The fact that the op-out-link goes to a signup page technically violates the Can-Spam Act (which requires that an opt-out procedure be both prominent and simple), but it seems no one cares about that any more.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      For such "optouts", the "report spam" button works as intended. If I didn't opt-in to the mailings, it's ethically spam (even if I'm your customer), and thus all your emails rightfully should be treated as emails from a known intentional spammer.
      - lutusp 13y ago
        That's the way I've always looked at it, but the Can-Spam Act perversely legitimizes what once would have been regarded as spam, and that to many, still is. Also, when people opt-out, what's to stop one business from sharing the addresses of opt-outs with another business, who then can drink from the same well? This is a glaring flaw in Can-Spam commented on by many, and it's why a number of influential organizations argued that it shouldn't have been made into law in the first place: http://www.pcworld.com/article/113137/article.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/113137/article.html Quote: "The Senate unanimously approved the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act last week. It requires e-mail users to opt out of unwanted commercial e-mail, instead of requiring e-mail senders to get permission before sending. That approach is backwards, say vendors of antispam technologies and at least one consumer advocacy group."
jessep 13y ago
I'd like to add a little data to this discussion, from the perspective of someone with a minimal landing page that makes you sign up. We (https://workflowy.com https://workflowy.com) built a try-first sign up flow, and a/b tested it against our current minimal signup page, which is a lot like those you describe. Unfortunately, the try-first performed FAR worse. Not only did we get fewer signups (which we expected). The engagement rate for users who had tried first was significantly LOWER. Exact same product. Same first time experience. One group tried before signing up, the other didn't. They liked it less. Isn't that odd? From my understanding, other services have experienced this same phenomenon. Why does this happen? It is hard to explain. It could be some aspect of our try-first design was flawed. But, my guess is that it's something psychological about signing up. I had expected and hoped that the try-first flow would improve word of mouth. I think many do. But it didn't. So I'd encourage as many people to bring data to the table as possible. I've found through doing tons of a/b tests that metrics often don't obey my logic.
- teleclimber 13y ago
  Fascinating. Thanks for sharing your data. There is something about having to put in a little effort up front, and giving up a little, that commits a user to try harder to use a service. I wonder if this phenomenon is a cousin of the well known characteristic that non-paying users tend to be more demanding and less appreciative of a given service than those who pay (premium users).
- vdaniuk 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing the information. I guess you are right, it is psychological. It is possible that two reasons contribute: time investment in the sign up that increases the value of the service and feeling of having personal space on the website.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  One key difference with what you've done though, is that through a link on the bottom I can at least figure out what your product does and see a sample workflow. Some of these sign up landing pages have nothing in the way of explaining what something is. But maybe what companies are finding is that people respond more strongly when details are withheld from them.

lutusp 13y ago

Quote: "99% of sites/apps/services we visit now make you register and go through an on-boarding process before getting to the meat of the product." That's because signing up is the product. The touted "product" is a fiction, a pander to get you to sign up. Another way to say this is you are the product, the advertised "product" is just bait to lure you in. If you haven't signed up and the company e-mails you, they're in violation of the Can-Spam Act. Once you've signed up, you become a customer, a category excluded from the sanctions of the Can-Spam Act. So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the only thing. I wish people who wrote articles like the linked one actually knew something -- that might make their articles worth reading.

codegeek 13y ago
"So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the only thing." Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not. If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up? If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want to use your app ? It doesn't. Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying customer or an active user. That is what matters not just a sign-up.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not. It may not matter to you, but it certainly matters to them. If you sign up, you become a customer. > If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up? Try to think like the site operator. They know they don't have anything interesting to offer you, but you certainly have something interesting to offer them: your identity. > If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want to use your app? Who cares? The point is to get you to sign up, reveal your personal information, not to offer you anything useful for your trouble. > Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying customer or an active user. You clearly don't understand how the Can-Spam Act works. The Can-Spam Act doesn't apply to people who are customers, i.e. people who have signed up. So by signing up, you've given permission to be spammed perpetually.

bambax 13y ago

So true; imgur should be mentioned as a service that offers great value without asking you to sign up. I started urgeous.com with the same idea: blogging without signup. It got zero traction and was/is maybe too complex to use as it is but I still believe in the idea! ;-)

kristopolous 13y ago
Service works. It's pretty nice. Here's some suggestions: * The <title> tag doesn't get the subject line. * I want a readable url. I would assume that my test url p34t3aaa44n could be a bit simpler. After all, the whole of YouTube is 11 characters. Something like /p34t3a/Title would be awesome. In base64 with 6 digit ids you still have a namespace of 68.7 billion posts. * There should be special markup just for your site. Here's an idea, something like: [theme:moonlight] Look at the nice darkness. * I don't use signatures but many do. This will be a hassle for them. * And finally, choose a different name. As an American at least, "Urgeous" sounds awful. Something more in-tune to what the site is would be great. I spent about 10 seconds doing some whois queries; emailpos.com is closer to what I'd be expecting - and it's available. Smash two words together, drop a vowel; all the cool kids are doing it.

hrvbr 13y ago

Well, I'm building a dating site as a hobby project. I could add a "Just try without an account" option but then, there's still a rather long form to fill to decide who the user should be connected with. Removing only two fields doesn't seem like a very good idea in this case.

jknfrsj 13y ago

Quora.

jneal 13y ago

I very often turn away from sites that ask me to sign up. It doesn't matter how interested I am, if you ask me to sign up without allowing me to see what I came to see, I will go away and forget I ever heard about you.

btoconnor 13y ago

This was a major reason for creating my board game web site, BreakBase ( http://www.breakbase.com http://www.breakbase.com ). All I wanted to do was play a board game against my friend, and not have to worry about all of the nuances of making an account. Just share a link and play a game. Making an account is an after-thought, if you like using the service. edit: hyperlinks, how do they work?

purplelobster 13y ago
Just like to say that I love this concept.

state 13y ago

Does anyone else find it ironic that there are so many articles bemoaning the annoyances of web services written on the web service Medium?

untilHellbanned 13y ago
good point, but isn't more that the Medium staff, probably all web developers, is highlighting these types of posts? I've written about basketball and other subjects and they literally get 0 views.

marchra 13y ago

HEAR, HEAR! The low point for me experiencing this was a pseudo-startup (really a product review blog) plastering their front page with a mandatory Facebook Connect. No, I think I'll abandon like the other 98% of your HN traffic.

crazygringo 13y ago

Sometimes, yes. But there are a lot of services where you do need an account to try it at all -- how are you going to try out Mint, or Duolingo, or Path, or OkCupid, without creating an account first? Obviously you can create "dummy accounts", but they often won't actually give a decent idea of the site's experience (browsing profiles on OkCupid doesn't give you anywhere near the experience of having people message you), and then how is the person going to convert their dummy account into a real one later on, if they never even put in their e-mail or password? There are certainly plenty of times when sites go overboard in asking too much of you up-front, but it's not always the case.

fonziguy 13y ago
Absolutely. I think Chartbeat does a good job of showing you the product before signing up https://chartbeat.com/demo https://chartbeat.com/demo and also https://www.intercom.io/ https://www.intercom.io/ have a great gradual engagement flow (where they actually need data to work effectively).
dredmorbius 13y ago
I can think of examples of most of those or similar services where either anonymous or test-account demos were available. Which is also, incidentally, a good way to test/check your own code.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tedsanders 13y ago
Actually, I think OkCupid would be a good candidate for gradual engagement. Letting you browse profiles before creating an account could make it easier to see what sort of people are on the site, what sort of work you'll have to do to write a profile, and generally set your expectations for what it's like to have an account there.
- jmtame 13y ago
  For this to work, you'd have to let your users opt-in to making their profiles public. Nothing stops a search engine crawler at this stage from caching everything, and most dating site users want their privacy. I don't think this would work.

tarr11 13y ago

Count me as the opposite. I like sites that have lots of screenshots and emails educating me on how something would work before I have to bother using it. I have seen a lot of sites that let me "try before I sign up". More often than not, this gets me caught in the weeds of the product and it feels like work and I get turned off.

xarien 13y ago

Yep, I completely agree. We actually did exactly this (just last week) and created a QR for a live demo on our landing page (www.infoduce.com). This way people can see more than just a screenshot before having to "sign up."

janjongboom 13y ago
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d000019-852-1136/qr%20code%20flow%20chart.jpg http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d0...
- xarien 13y ago
  It's a hyperlink. Do you use hyperlinks?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymoushn 13y ago
    Are QR codes on business cards actually easier to use than short URLs on business cards?
    - xarien 13y ago
      Sorry about my earlier terse reply. I was a bit short on time. The reference to the hyperlink was meant to be an analogy to QR codes in general which serve as a transportation vehicle akin to hyperlinks. Your question in the ease of using QR codes is actually a great question. What many people find is that while it may not be difficult to type a short link, the act of transcribing it from another source is prone to error and mistakes. The value add in regards to technologies such as QR, NFC, bluetooth etc is that it removes human errors. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of limitations in regards to QR codes as well as other technologies which bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual mediums, but they do serve a specific purpose. At the end of the day, it's really about ROI (very little investment, especially when it comes to QR) and the way they are used.

ig1 13y ago

Users expect to register. I've seen UX lab studies testing it, without registration users get really confused and don't understand what's happening with their data. Conversion can actually drop heavily with non-registration approaches. Obviously it depends on the app, one where you only need to use it once you can and probably should design your UX to not need it. But if your app actually needs to maintain user state over multiple sessions then creating a user makes a lot of sense. (Although you can build up user profile over time rather than requiring it upfront)

yarianluis 13y ago

This article makes points that sound fine on the surface, but ignore reality. There's a very good reason why a lot of sites do this and won't stop any time soon--it works. The article claims some effects to "conversions, usage and how people feel about your product" but is very light on the details of how it actually affects those things. Getting a user to sign up facilitates a whole range of options (promotional emails being just one of them) that help drive user retention and engagement. I am not advocating making your product obscure until they sign up. The value proposition of your product should be clear, regardless of whether someone signs up or not. But it is not clear that making them signup before they can actually use it for themselves decreases conversion or usage. The complaint made here will become ever weaker as "Sign Up with Google" and other single-sign-on services become more widespread. Signing up in those cases takes a single click, and my experience is in many cases instantly personalized with my data from other services. This might make some HN denizens cringe, but the average person seems to not mind.

Silhouette 13y ago
I don't understand why the parent is getting downvoted. It is one of the few rational, realistic posts so far in this discussion. [Edit: In the time it took to write this post, a few other people now seem to have expressed similar views.] Of course visitors would rather try everything for free indefinitely and never give anything up in return. That's obvious. On the other hand, in today's world, web sites are often transient things you find via social networks and search engines and visit only briefly the first time. Even if you find a site interesting, if you forget to bookmark it somewhere obvious or you found it at work but get distracted by the time you reach home, you might never think to go back. From the site owner's point of view, if subsequent more deeply engaged visits never happen and they have no way of re-engaging with genuine prospective customers, they could be losing a huge proportion of their potential revenues. There's always a balancing act in these things, trying to demonstrate enough value to a prospect as easily as possible that they engage, yet not giving away so much that they have little incentive to engage and don't see enough extra value to justify becoming a paying customer. Trying to get people to sign up when they don't even know what you do yet is probably not a good strategy, but neither is letting them see so much that they wind up just circulating around your site and never converting. Ultimately, if being a little more aggressive about getting people to the next stage of conversion puts some people off, that's good. Those people probably weren't going to sign up anyway, and all they were doing was wasting your resources and polluting your data about genuine prospects. It sounds harsh and unpleasant to say it so bluntly, but it's probably the reality if you're running a modern commercial site that offers genuine value but isn't an essential service where visitors are certain to come looking again later.

rogerbinns 13y ago

It can cost real money foregone as the $300 million button article showed http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ On the weekend I decided to try some boots from Zappos. They were bought by Amazon 4 years ago, and have "legendary" customer service. Not in my experience. You can login with your Amazon account, but then it asks for your name. Strange. I go to checkout and they want my billing name, street, city, zip, state, same for shipping, card number, expiry, cvc and who knows what else. Turns out that they aren't integrated with Amazon in any meaningful way. I sent them an email about it - maybe I'd missed something. I got some nonsense explanation about it being for my security. Then they started spamming me about the abandoned shopping cart. At this point I discovered that each cs rep has some "humourous" boilerplate about how they are going to help you, before doing something completely unhelpful. They also don't keep track of replies (an id in the subject or just looking at the in-reply-to header would work) so each one starts a new ticket where a different rep doesn't look at the history and does a completely different unhelpful thing. I've now asked 3 times that they delete my account.

namlem 13y ago
Wow that's awful. I do hope amazon is working on it. They're usually pretty big on interconnectivity between their services.

spindritf 13y ago

I don't mind that. What bothers me is not knowing what a service actually does. Either no summary on their website, or what is much more common -- in follow-up e-mails. I sign up for a service, or an invite for a service, or even just for a launch announcement, and weeks or months later get an e-mail that makes no mention of what is being touted. But it's a plague in general. It's very common that Wikipedia has better descriptions of companies or software projects, even their commercial offering than the official website. Try looking up which language some piece of software is written in. Often, googling it + github and then clicking on the repo breakdown is the easiest way to find out.

pbreit 13y ago

I suspect we don't hate signing up as much as the OP posits. I particularly dislike the shopping sites such as One Kings Lane that required singnup/login just to browse, but apparently OKL is doing something right since it I believe it's a "leader". On the contrary, Stripe's guest access always struck me as very odd, and unlikely to be copied. For payments, I'd rather go ahead and signup to get my sandbox account.

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago

Another potential alternative: local accounts. I worked on a site that's very privacy-oriented and users were still asking for accounts. We didn't want to store their information on our servers. Instead, we use localstorage to keep their settings and a list of things they've uploaded. They don't even have to sign in, and they still get the same experience. Try it: https://mediacru.sh https://mediacru.sh It obviously won't work for everyone, but if you just want to offer users a means to keep track of what they've been doing on your site, consider going locally.

r00fus 13y ago
Have you had any issues with folks who switch browsers or computers not seeing their localstorage (which doesn't sync/migrate, IIRC)? I suppose highly-privacy-oriented users would prefer it that way...
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Sorry for the late response - the answer is no. We haven't received any complaints yet. However, we don't have the greatest of followings, so there aren't a lot of users to complain to us.

chermanowicz 13y ago

someone should send this to Quora

ryandrake 13y ago

I think Apple's app review guidelines help somewhat in this regard. They specifically forbid apps from requiring registration in order to work. I have had several apps rejected for this reason, and am now careful to always offer a path into apps that can be taken without signing up for an account. Of course, they seem to enforce this irregularly, but at least their policy indicates they seem get it.

king_magic 13y ago
My home/lifestyle social networking app for iOS, Let's Go Home (https://letsgohomeapp.com https://letsgohomeapp.com), requires sign up to work. So do Facebook, Twitter, Path, and dozens of other apps.
ripter 13y ago
iPhone apps that require me to signup or log into Facebook quickly get deleted.

patio11 13y ago

"If we use gradual engagement, we will have more, higher quality signups" is a testable hypothesis. It has been tested, by many companies. I regret that I am not at liberty to disclose most specific results, but gradual engagement is really tricky to pull off well, and has often roundly failed compared to the traditional get-their-email-first signup screen. This is true even at companies which don't do anything very sophisticated with the email address once they have it, which is (IMHO) generally a mistake in the sort of markets I usually work in. The one product I can talk about: Back in the day, Bingo Card Creator had one-click guest accounts. Their conversion rate was 2. Not two percent. Two. Ever. They were a cause of a stupendous portion of my support burden. (From the perspective of most of my users gradual engagement means "The Googles ate my work and now you have ruined the day of a room full of third graders, you monster.") The engineering to support them was fiddly, and ripping it out made the application better. (Despite several attempts to improve them I don't think I ever had near the UX work invested to make the experience not be awful. Again, gradual engagement UX is quite challenging. In particular, the handoff between guest accounts and "real" trial accounts is of paramount importance to my business but is meaningless to customers who have guest accounts until they get to school, at which point they will often discover, to their surprise, that failing to make the decision yesterday to give me their email address now means their cards are totally inaccessible. I never successfully figured out a way -- copy, design, workflow, etc -- to avoid having huge numbers of people fail at this use case.) Discontinuing guest accounts increased signups of "real" accounts and also sales, if I remember correctly. You can eyeball the signup graph here http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-day http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-day Apologies in advance for the unclear axes -- that page hasn't had the underlying code updated in years, and I didn't even consider "Hey if I run this business for forever eventually that axis is going to get crowded."

nostromo 13y ago
I think most of this anti-registration sentiment is coming from places like Quora which force you to register for no good reason, not sites that have a valid reason for an account. (I've never heard someone complain about needing to sign up to use Amazon.) GlassDoor is particularly obnoxious (as I just found out yesterday). If you click on this link http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm all data will show. If you click almost any link or simply refresh the page, it's all hidden, blurred, and you get greeted with an overlay saying you must sign up.

pjbrunet 13y ago

I totally agree. Save to temporary cookies, let me try it. If I want to continue using the product, ask for my email. That's it.

Simple1234 13y ago
Indeed. Now that a lot of sites allow you to sign up with Facebook, I use my fake Facebook account almost as much as my real one.

olegp 13y ago

We tried this with the web app launcher at https://starthq.com https://starthq.com. Visitors could create their app launcher before signing up. It did not work as expected as users were confused and few completed the process. Right now we ask for the email up front, but don't demand that the email is verified by clicking the link we send them. This works much better and we're seeing more than two thirds of the users coming back after the initial visit.

gfodor 13y ago

"Stop making testable claims without evidence." "Stop making absolute claims about things that may only be true sometimes." "Stop assuming what frustrates you frustrates everyone." "Stop thinking that other people cannot see 'obvious' design flaws like you can and didn't think through the tradeoffs involved."

couchdive 13y ago

Hey, if you don't use our product, At least we can sell your data!

shurcooL 13y ago

What can I say, it's a good point. 500px does this nicely by giving you an anon user account on your first visit, and you can use the site in full that way. If you prefer to "sign up" and keep your stuff, it can be done.

josephlord 13y ago

I suppose for me there are several categories. 1) If other data or significant user input of any sort is required or possible get a log in so that progress can be recovered. Shopping is probably an exception, I don't generally want an account just to buy the thing. 2) If it is a webservice or API or something similar I won't sign up generally until I have seen a) the pricing b) some documentation and c) had the option to review the terms of service. Going back to an earlier post today about improper use of Google's maps API. Don't hide your sales information (and that includes technical documentation) behind a sign in without a good reason. 3) In some cases I understand the the email address and permission to send me further marketing is the price of access to some information. I understand this and if the offer is good enough I may expect although I will probably decline four out of five times.

lg 13y ago

I hate creating new accounts with passwords, etc but I don't mind "sign in with facebook/google/something most people already have".

jasomill 13y ago
And I feel exactly the opposite, because, while I don't use Facebook or stay logged in to a Google account, I do use a password manager.

snarfy 13y ago

This is why I'll never try feedly.com. What is it? What does it do? Without giving them sign up information, I'll never know.

DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
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mikejarema 13y ago

Great example of try first, signup later that I coincidentally just discovered is Litmus' email rendering preview system - https://litmus.com/email-testing https://litmus.com/email-testing They go quite far with it, which was really nice for my specific use case, allowing me to share the results with my team before proceeding with registration. Now it begs the question whether or not I'll come back later to signup for the service, but regardless they've left a fantastic impression on me as a potential future user.

jurassic 13y ago

If I recall, Pandora has a relatively gentle onboarding. You can start a new station without being logged in and it's not until you interact with the site further (to rate, skip, etc) that they start pester you to sign up. I don't know how their conversion rates are, but I appreciated being allowed to at least get a brief feel for it before handing over my contact info.

dools 13y ago

We implemented this with Decal about year ago with an online tour that requires no signup[1]. We initially had an online tour which not only required signup but verified your email. Not only did this mean fewer people would try it out, but it meant we got a great deal of disposable emails. Our motivation was obvious: we wanted the free tour to get leads. Each time someone created an account to test, some resources were consumed so we needed to make sure we got a "high value" lead with a valid email. When I watched Kevin Hale's Mixergy interview he talks about the fact that when they first launched the idea of Wufoo on their blog particletree they didn't even have a backend. It just demonstrated to people what it was like to use. We were inspired by that when creating our own tour and we created a way to communicate the benefits our product offers for both deployment and end user interface in a frontend application that requires no signup or account creation. Interestingly, not only do we get a better quality of email now, but about 50% of people who take the tour, put their email address in even though we only ask for it at the end. [1]http://www.decalcms.com/ http://www.decalcms.com/

brentisx 13y ago
I'm not sure I understand why you would require an email to see a product tour???? I've reread your post 2x and it is not clear. If this is the case, I agree - bad idea. Another thing you can do as incremental is provide dummy data or fixed queries which give them a taste of the UI but not with their data.

bryanp123 13y ago

Totally agree with this article! There are very few instances where a signup is mandatory to "test the waters". At the very least you should be able to observe(not participate) an app/site/whatever without having to give credentials. Every time I make something new, whether for myself or for work, conversion is the very first though. How can I eliminate text inputs, make less required, or eliminate them all together until the user feels it is worth their time to actually sign up? This is the question everyone creating these sites should ask. It's incredibly frustrating to make it half way through the hoops on some promising website or app only to be confronted with the "sign up now" to get what you actually came here for in the first place and wasted 30 minutes creating, oh and where's your credit card? You can shove that right up your ass, i'm out, oh and pissed. How this works is beyond me. I'd rather spend a week, month, year whatever making something better for myself than be bullied into signing up for your crap app.

alexvr 13y ago

Like nearly everyone else, I despise going through the registration process on every site I try. But certain applications simply don't work without registration. Actually, lots of applications don't. I recently started working on a tiny web app (http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer) that lets you find your computer if it's lost or stolen, and by its very nature it's quite useless if you can't log in to see your device's location (and it's absurdly revealing if you alternatively display a page with thousands of names and corresponding coordinates). Since many sites simply wouldn't work without registration, I propose that we make registration more painless (maybe get rid of the whole email requirement and instead delete accounts that don't verify with email if they are clearly spammers or inactive) or, when a registration-free trial is not viable due to the nature of the application, we could design sites with a demo feature or demo video.

jpalomaki 13y ago

Instead of abandoning the registration, maybe it could be streamlined to make it easier for the user. In many cases it would be enough to just ask for user's email address. Giving just some email address would allow me in to service and I could start using it. On the background the system would send me the standard welcome message via email, but that would not require any immediate action from my behalf. If I decided to become a regular user, I could then setup my password on the service. Maybe the system could point out in the UI that I'm not yet fully registered. In case I forgot the whole thing and tried to use the same email to log on the service next week, the service would remind me that this email is already in use and ask me to go through the verification process to setup a password.

educating 13y ago

The best way to stop making people sign up is to have a universal authentication method that is trusted and used by everyone. I don't believe we'll see a good one in our lifetime. But, that would stop an involved sign-up process.

mugiltsr 13y ago

If you are not making sign-up mandatory, you would not be able to validate the pain point of the problem. People normally would give you their email address(or even pay through their credit card) if you are solving burning problem for them. For self funded start-ups, this may not work. However, this technique discussed in the article may work for consumer start-ups where you think of making money later and your present problem is to get millions of users.I assume you have sufficient runway(could be in the form of venture funding) to follow this approach.

tchock23 13y ago
Exactly - if someone won't even register to create an account, there is almost zero chance they are going to fork over their credit card info at some point in the future. Asking for registration validates they will take some small step toward becoming a customer.

voidgmr 13y ago

This is the reason I started working on Streme (http://streme.co http://streme.co). I just wanted to be able to collaborate on a list of links (for sharing music recommendations with my brother) without needing to register for something and then also without having to convince him to register as well.

sspiff 13y ago

2013 and we still haven't really gotten to a good, universal single-sign on system. OpenID seemed like it was going to get us there (at least to me), but nowadays many sites moved away in favour of Google or Facebook or Twitter specific logins, often asking for a little more rights than I'm comfortable giving them. Still, anything is better than signing up to a site with a username and password, and receiving a mail with your account info in plain text. Since the LinkedIn and Twitter hacks, I've lost faith in the backend developers to treat the storage of account info with the respect they deserve. (at least use a hash and a unique salt per user...)

quadrangle 13y ago
The solution is already here but is still beta: Mozilla Persona (previously known as browserid)
- sspiff 13y ago
  Interesting, I hadn't seen Persona before (I associated it with their previous "Firefox Persona" skinning system.

sebastianconcpt 13y ago

I understand the motivation for promiscuous early adopters but what's the motivation for the business? If your business implement this strategy, you're relinquishing (in exchange of nothing) to the benefit of user retention created by the loss aversion bias and sense of belonging that the "harder" conversion has generated.

hmans 13y ago

"Stop making me sign up. [...] Discuss this on Hacker News."

giociferri 13y ago

Very nice article Lee! I think that we need to reimagine the way we catch our users because many people hate to have to register to try a product.

afonsopraca 13y ago

That's It!

coreyward 13y ago

Users are currency in the business of the web, and until putting a 5+ digit number of signups in your deck is ineffective, we'll optimize for the collection of email addresses over engagement.

brentisx 13y ago

Umm.. you are missing a huge part of the psychology behind incremental buy-in. Think about it a bit. If someone let you test drive a Ferrari for a year would you ever be inclined to buy it? Why right. But if you had 20 friends tell you something is amazing and you should buy it and you will be amazed, chances are you will be intrigued and much more likely to put your money down. SaaS/cloud products are much harder to sell IMO than downloadable software too. We used to use the analogy that if someone is downloading your software we are getting an invitation into someone's front door to sell them on the product's virtues. With SaaS, the sales scenario is kin to trying to sell via product display in a crowded mall. Sensory overload with too many different options to distract someone's attention.

belmontjones 13y ago

Slows development end of story. Since the dawn of the library people liked to be able to browse freely!!! meaning they could pick up and put down knowledge at will. Think to the shitty D&D movie and how the thieves want to sneak into the mages horde of knowledge and what a shitty hitty world that was