Corvus Consulting

A prevailing direction in online registration has been to ask only for the minimum information required to create an account.It sounds like a surefire formula: less=easier=better=more customers. Despite whittling down what we ask for at registration and innovations using 3rd parties as authentication points and basic profile data sources, we never seem to get past treating registration as an unpleasant tax that new members must be hurried past.

No matter how immediate the gratification of minimalist registration, the approach boxes us into few choices for crafting the experience past the front door. As such, we end up dropping new members into an impersonal and uncalibrated signed-in homepage, or into an orientation or personalization process that is also abstracted from the core experience.

I’m a believer in “Less is More”, but I’m not sure that persistent problems with new member registration are just about the number of fields. Can taking signup out of the frame of mere account creation turn it into a more coherent first step of the new member experience? I think so.

Stop Thinking Accounts, Start Thinking People

Instead of asking what the system minimally requires to create an account, we should ask what is the least amount of information needed to provide a great first experience.

That doesn’t mean asking for the world on a signup form. Consider a hypothetical content recommendation service. The signup form can ask for the usual suspects of name, email and password. If we just stop there, the system has enough to produce an output, namely an account. At this point the outcome for a person is about zero, yet we consider the use case complete.

Now suppose we add two fields to that form: one preferred artist and one preferred genre. The system then would have what it needs to make an account, but also what it needs to produce some starter recommendations. That kind of first impression is more personal and relevant than saying “Welcome, [Name]” in the page header, which is the most we could do with the three-field approach.

Accepted Wisdom might respond that “people hate filling out forms and your registrations will drop like a stone if you add fields.” Not so fast, Accepted Wisdom.

Actually, People Hate Doing Useless Work

A recent innovation in registration forms is to put the fields into a more human context in the style of Mad Libs. The canonical example comes from Huffduffer, and goes like this:

I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be ___________ and I want my password to be _____________. My email address is _________________. By the way, my name is _______________ and my website is ___________________.

Luke Wroblewski has a great writeup of the idea, and testing by Vast.com shows it increased registrations by an impressive 25-40%. My sense of why the Mad Lib format helps is that people feel like they’re being treated like people. It strikes me that the Mad Lib approach to forms could also use sentences that indicate the outcome generated by the data a person enters. Returning to they hypothetical recommendation service, the form might say

When you look for music to recommend, keep in mind that my favourite genre is _______ and I’ve recently been listening to a lot of music by _________.

The perception of what someone will get out of doing some work greatly influences how much effort they’re willing to spend. I came across some recent research that found asking for the minimal required information drove down engagement because it lowered expectations of the outcome. Instead of ‘hating forms’,

[C]ustomers found the initial process too short, making them doubt its accuracy and feel that the quote would not meet their needs… [They] overwhelmingly preferred to take the time over a few more steps to accurately enter all the information required to get a precise quote once only.

When it’s not abused and the reasons behind a request for a piece of information are clear, people are very willing to spend a little more effort to get a better outcome on the other side. Rather than abstracting registration to a minimized inconvenience, we should strive to integrate it into the overall product experience and make the best use of what people can tell us when they come through the front door.