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Registration - Last chance for first impressions

Registration - Last chance for first impressions (Gerry Gaffney: Apogee) — “We often see registration processes that are designed to get the maximum amount of information. In a social setting, this is like being a person who is ‘only interested in what they can get’. If marketing or sales requirements have prompted you to ask for more information than is actually needed to complete the registration process, then you are running the risk of being seen in this light.”

Nice little article.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 9:08 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Registration - Last chance for first impressions”

  1. Jason Coleman Says:
    March 10th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Interesting little article. The idea of it at least makes me want to take another look at our registration pages.

    I think the general message of the article is sound, but disagree with the two specific examples they give:

    (1) “We often ask clients why they want users to enter their email address twice, for example.”

    (2) “We also ask why users need to specify a user name, when an email address would be adequate for most non-sensitive situations.”

    I’m a bit torn RE (1) there. How often will someone mistype their email? 5%? 1%? Maybe it’s not worth the hassle to the other 95% of users. However, it has become a convention and it really is a big deal if users don’t get that next email: (a) they won’t be signed up for the account and have to do it again, (b) some random person may get the email, and (c) we’ll have an orphaned user in our system, possibly keeping the actual user from getting the username they chose.

    Since it’s such a convention now, I figure that it’s not too much of a hassle to avoid a, b, and c.

    RE (2), if a username is only used for logging in then I think an email address would be a good substitute. However, usernames are used for more. At WineLog, your username is used in the URL to access your Wine Log (http://www.winelog.net/winelog/jason). You don’t want to put emails in URLs. Also, usernames are often used to identify content you produce on the site, and most users don’t want to share their email.

  2. John Rhodes Says:
    March 12th, 2007 at 12:00 am

    Jason,

    Loving winelog…

    http://www.winelog.net/

    I missed the re-design. Very nice!

    ~ John

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