Today I saw a familiar pattern on a website for an analytics product. The home page pitched the product, and then above the signup form there was a headline: “Sign up in seconds.”
I see this all the time on signup forms and it makes me wonder: why did the designer put that there? My best guess is that they were trying to relieve some anxiety the customer might have. Like, “don’t worry, it’ll be over soon!”
I’ll bet that the time-to-signup isn’t an important anxiety factor. When’s the last time you shopped for a software product under intense time pressure, where every second counts?
When I evaluate web products I often feel uncertain about what will happen after the quick signup. Sure it takes seconds to create an account, but then what?
I had an idea to address this uncertainty. You could preview the workflow steps that come after the signup so it’s clear how much of a gap there is between signing up and getting value out of the product.
Check out this sketch. It shows “what happens” after you signup. Once you sign up, you get a Javascript code, paste it into your website, and then you can watch real live graphics of traffic come to your website. Sounds pretty easy right? Why not try it?
I haven’t tested this approach on any sites. Intuitively I like how it integrates the call to action with the sales pitch in a single flow. What do you think?
Ryan wrote this on Apr 30 2012 There are 34 comments.
Nate 30 Apr 12
Love it. I can’t help but also think about the psychology behind this, and folks strong desire to complete things that are left unfinished. It’s often talked about when you see things like LinkedIn tell you that your profile is 70% complete.
I wonder if your approach would get an even stronger conversion rate if you fooled with showing this signup form and the other 3 steps as a percentage to complete a goal. A bar underneath this for example.
Uzo 30 Apr 12
A way to manage expectation and give the potential client a guide on how to get their feet wet with the product.
It’s very reminiscent of Apple ads that give you a walkthrough of a given feature. You know pretty much how Facetime is going to work even before you get your hands on the device.
Seems legit.
John Nelson 30 Apr 12
For products that are not very valuable, ease of signup is critically important. In this case, the requirement of a lengthy signup process relative to what they get afterwards would be enough to convince them that it’s just not worth it. Conversely, in highly-valued products, the signup process is much less of a consideration, as the user is so focused on how the product will benefit them.
I don’t believe the designers are acting to alleviate anxiety
Forrest 30 Apr 12
I always assumed that it’s just about minimizing any friction for lead capture. Sign up in seconds reenforces how easy it is, and tries to make it feel like something trivial. You’re not signing up for a whole new service, you’re just pushing a button!
If I’m not sure how long it will take to sign up, I might decide to come back later. That’s really why this is ubiquitous, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it meaningfully helped conversion rates in many contexts.
I like your idea too, though, especially if the process seems simple and easy and fast.
Peter Cooper 30 Apr 12
My best guess is that they were trying to relieve some anxiety the customer might have. Like, “don’t worry, it’ll be over soon!”
In 37signals’ signup form redesign of 2009, a “You’re just 60 seconds away from your new Basecamp account” slogan was added: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1867-design-decisions-new-signup-form .. it’s just a snappier form of that. The first comment on that blog post also shows how a user felt about the change.
All that said, I think the process shown in the last sketch on this post is even better!
Peter Cooper 30 Apr 12
Also back in 2009, you discovered that a headline mentioning “Sign-up takes less than 60 seconds” outperformed your other headlines.
Ben Burke 30 Apr 12
You can not forget the business owner. The quick sign up is a means to get your product in front of faces. If there are any barriers to your product, your job is to eliminate them. Should the customer then choose to not continue service with you, that is the main concern.
Anonymous Coward 30 Apr 12
@37signals
What would the 3 steps be for Basecamp.
Cameron 30 Apr 12
I like it, a lot.
This is not a new idea, but I also am a fan of on-boarding where the application or service allows the user to use the product before signing up. Tumblr actually just rolled out this type of design function in their most recent home-page redesign and I think it’s powerful.
We don’t usually make our users pay to try on clothes at a boutique or make our users pay for their meals before they’ve eaten it.
This one depends on the eatery of coarse, but I’m talking ‘finer’ dining experiences.
Ryan 30 Apr 12
Right. I’m questioning whether signup time is really a barrier or not in this case.
Stacy 30 Apr 12
It depends if getting started is “really” very simple. Often times you need more info from a user to give a good first expression, etc, timezone, company name for instant branding, etc. If you give a half-ass experience because you have not collected the personalized info, this concept will backfire, IMHO .
Prospects who really NEED your “particular” product/service will sign-up anyway, or email you for more info, or call you if your phone number is visible. Market to those folks.
Allen 01 May 12
Excellent. A couple more things – I’ve seen several sites that only seem to require an email and a password, but afterwards ask for quite a bit more information. Clearly defining the extend of the necessary information with a statement like “only need an email address” would help alleviate this concern. Also, you might want to quickly define what the email address will be used for – if not much, this could be addressed with a quick popup when the email field has focus.
Zarel 01 May 12
Wow… every time I visit this blog, I get something new.. that’s why I always come back to this blog, LOL !
That great Idea! Let’s kill google analytics! ;)
Zarel 01 May 12
@stacy, I think if you want to collect more information from users, make sure they are impressed by your product first, then you can take their longer time to fill your form.
If they aren’t impressed by your product, why they should waste their time to fill long journeyyy form.
Greg H 01 May 12
I like to approach the problem from a slightly different perspective. It’s not so much the sign-up form that is the barrier to entry as it is when you present it. It’s an easy, often implemented case, that before you can do anything, you must sign up. Instead, why not let the user start using the app, and only present them with a form to sign up for the service when they get to a point which it would make sense (often when they do something that needs to be stored)? This may not be the right solution for everyone, but I think the default case that most people come up with is to wall every aspect of their app behind an authentication system, and this is not always a good approach. Then you as a user know what happens next when you sign up, because it’s the thing you were about to do.
Joe 01 May 12
“I’m questioning whether signup time is really a barrier or not.” I’ve seen several A/B tests which show that it is. I don’t think it’s anxiety as much as just human behavior. Easier, faster less investment “why not try it out”.
Anonymous Coward 01 May 12
Is signup time really a barrier to users who are genuinely interested in the product/service, or does it serve to weed out those who probably wouldn’t purchase anyway?
Ryan 01 May 12
I would not be too quick to interpret A/B test data by saying it indicates a barrier or something like that. The test data tells you a conversion rate, but it doesn’t tell you the reason for the behavior or the long term implications of the design.
GeeIWonder 01 May 12
It’s the whole Bill Cosby/dinner on a garbage plate story.
Signup time isn’t a deal breaker, but if you waste my time I’m not going to be inclined to be happy. Even worse, if you lie to me by requiring more info than a name and a password and/or endless ‘next’, ‘just one more step’ ‘almost there’ garbage prompts, you’ve probably lost my rust and my business forever.
Aki 01 May 12
As a general pattern I really like the idea but I believe it works best under specific circumstances: E.g. a digital product which is new to the user and easy to gain value from.
I don’t see that in the context of analytics software. It might be much harder to wrench valuable information from it. Ease of configuration or if it can’t be said in a few words, happy client citations could hit a soft spot …
The shown steps won’t differentiate the product fom the usual suspects. Someone who looks for sth. new might be most willing to give product X a test drive if it promises to be useful fast and not complicated to handle – and that you own all the data ;)
Without knowing the product behind the sketch I guess the form might perform better with a subline telling sth. like “configuration is easy” or “Our experts help you how to get true value out of X”
All all this might become an overload with the suggested FAQ style pattern – it might be merged to one visual element.
After all I totally agree that only lowering the friction is not enough on a sign up form and I’d be really curious how the pattern would perform in a sensible context.
foljs 01 May 12
I’ve seen several A/B tests which show that [signup time is a barrier].
I would not be too quick to interpret A/B test data by saying it indicates a barrier or something like that. The test data tells you a conversion rate, but it doesn’t tell you the reason for the behavior or the long term implications of the design.
I fail to see the logic of this statement.
If the A/B was made to A/B test the impact of change in the signup process (easy vs difficult, slow vs fast), then a lower conversion rate is all you need to know to see that signup time is a barrier.
Do you assume that the A/B tests the other poster mentioned also changed numerous other things?
Erik 01 May 12
Generally, when the absolute first thing that pops up is a signup box requesting an email and password, I click away.
If I can’t even read an overview page about the product / service, and what features and value it offers me, why should I be inclined to submit my email?
I know from being on the marketing side of things that the reason for this has nothing to do with ease of signup and everything to do with capturing user identity as early as possible.
If you can get their email first, and the product isn’t right for them, well then you can still harass them with emails hoping to convert at some point!
Or, just as often, it’s a new product / site that is still trying to figure out what it is and who it’s serving. They don’t KNOW what value they should be offering at this point, so they are just trying to throw a net over every potential user that stumbled onto them (somehow) so that they can go back and ask them questions later. How did you find us? What were you looking for? Do you find us helpful? What else can we add? Etc…
If it’s the former (marketing) I find it to be an empty and cynical strategy. If it’s the latter (lack of focus / design exploration) I find that the product isn’t ready for prime time and I have no interest.
The few times that I have gone against my better judgment and signed up anyway, the product is always disappointing to me. And then I need to go through the effort of unsubscribing to their list.
When a product stands on its own and the designers have a clear and focused purpose and value and don’t let themselves be attracted by the siren song of vacuuming up as many email addresses as possible, that’s usually a good product. And that’s when I generally don’t encounter this!
AJ Siegel 01 May 12
@Ryan, I think the purpose of your 4-pane sketch is to show users how easy it is to GET VALUE out of the site/product they are registering for. So instead of “Sign up in 30 seconds”, maybe the better point is to say, “Start [YOUR VALUE STATEMENT ] in as little as 2 minutes”
This way the customer is aware of how soon they’ll start seeing value in the tool they are signing up for.
Cookie 01 May 12
Psychologically, I think it would be a good idea. My point of reference is online surveys. I much prefer the ones that tell me “you are on page 3 of 12” since it gives me an idea of how much longer I’ll be there. The ones that say “takes about 15 minutes” are pretty meaningless, overall, since there’s so many variables that impact that 15 minutes.
So that value-added model works for me. It would give me a sense of comfort going in knowing how much of a commitment is expected from me time- and energy-wise.
stefan 01 May 12
I think you are seeing the “sign up in seconds” in a wrong way. For me the meaning of this is that signing is simple and will take only one or two steps and no more. I hate sites where I am required more then two steps to sign up or more then one to login. So this phrase, besides the word “seconds” has nothing to do with time, it is to do whether it is simple or not and it is a promise from the site to me that it should be simple.
This is not only for analytics services but for all kind of service, and the “what’s next” question is not part of this flow. If I sign up for something, it’s an action I’ve taken because I already have an idea of what’s next and I want to go there.
Design Dude 01 May 12
I agree you can skip the sign-up process entirely, and go straight to delivering value. Obviously you’ll need to capture some info to “save” the account data, but there are many techniques for this. IF you wan to see how this technique works in action visit TurboTax, they only ask you to create an account at the end..;-)
Steven Walker 01 May 12
Often times, setting expectations and giving users the ability understand their commitment up-front will get them to commit when they otherwise wouldn’t have. I like this a lot.
Ryan 01 May 12
Design Dude: Thanks for recommending the TurboTax sign-up process. That was worth checking out. Cool how they step you through picking a plan and take you right into the real app without any account creation step.
Des Traynor 02 May 12
We have this style of sign up in Intercom.
One of the barriers we had to overcome was the cynical “Sure, but how easy is this? Sounds like a pain” attitude.
So we exposed exactly what the Javascript looks like and how it works. It seems to work well.
For what it’s worth, in my experience, sign up (and installing JS) is a barrier that stops certain people from signing up. Non technical folks, people who run serious apps but don’t have a test one handy, tech journalists, etc. They’re not all potential customers but they’re all potentially valuable. That’s why we build a dummy mode too where you can click through without adding any code
Tony 02 May 12
I think you guys have it right in having the signup progress from left to right.
Nikzad 04 May 12
This sign-up process brings clarity to the customer. UX improves drastically.
Another feature which kind irritates me is that pricing tables in various websites have 4-5 columns of different plans which are spread for numerous rows of irrelevant categories. I don’t have the freedom to see & compare any 2 of those options (removing the rest) along with the relevant row category that is important for me to take that buying decision.
A cool add-on feature would be to be able to email that across for any further business decision or approval is needed by the customer’s end.
Ryan hope you can make a simplistic process flow for such chaotic pages as well.
Michele 04 May 12
While researching other companies that are similar to ours, I saw this a lot. It made me think about the reason behind it. What’s the urgancy? At www.payrentchex.com we have a system that allows residents to pay their rent online but also helps to manage properties. We don’t want our clients to be able to just “sign up”, we want to collaborate with them to make sure its a good fit for their business. We alter our system to coincide with what is currently working for them.
Ryan Greene 06 May 12
I have seen similar previews of the steps one has to take on other sites (ATt&Ts job application process most recently) and I always find it to be helpful. By knowing there are X more steps, it sets user expectation, and lets them see the finish line.
Go for it!
Mikel 07 May 12
Just tried this out on my site selling royalty free music. I used four panels to show the checkout and download process. After I got it up there, I felt like my site looked more credible.
It was also an easy way to squeeze in a couple more logos for trust building.
This discussion is closed.