Interesting. One opposite experience: anonymous Wikipedia editing. Most registered Wikipedians today (59%) say they edited anonymously before registering. That

Interesting. One opposite experience: anonymous Wikipedia editing. Most registered Wikipedians today (59%) say they edited anonymously before registering. That doesn't mean they all necessarily did, but it suggests it's being used in this "try before you buy" way. One piece of data that backs this up for us... If you're anonymous, there is a call to action on the edit window that informs you're not logged in, and invites you to sign up. That one small link on the edit interface is 9% of all signups on English Wikipedia, and these users have a much higher first time edit rate. On some other language Wikipedias, like Spanish and Japanese, it's even higher -- between 10 and 20% of all signups. I find this somewhat boggling, because in theory it's a horrible experience to interrupt people mid-edit. I think your tests with Workflowly and the first commenters examples are still correct by and large. Getting users to commit after they try something without signup is tricky, and you lose the ability to easily call them back via email. For me, the larger lesson is that you need to test this rigorously and be prepared for either approach to fail. It all depends on your product and what your users are like. Turns out many successful Wikipedians are the type who love to dive right in and change things. People who declare that either approach is always going to be superior are falling prey to a bad assumption about how all products and users are alike.