How to Achieve Painless Registration

asktog.com

12 points·latif··9 comments

To improve my signup rate I took the leap of faith of making the sign form have four fields: name, email, and two password fields. I don't even require an image verification.

After signup the user is directed to their account panel on which they can fill out any extra details that they may want to provide.

Dont require password confirmation if you have an email.. they can always use the lost/forgot password feature.

Or, even more spartan, don't ask for a password: the sign up box would just be an email address field with a button labeled "Sign Up" next to it. You could autogenerate the password and let them change it later, or just ask for it once you click the emailed link. As well, you could reformat the address recipient part into a valid username and default to that, but offer then the option of changing it any time in the first 48 hours, as a preference.

The second password field is necessary to avoid confusing your users.

It's the only element that can cleanly disambiguate between a normal 'sign in' and a clean 'sign up'.

Very true. I could probably remove the second password field without any loss.

Two fields is adequate. Image verification can be staged. With Javascript you can check that someone is actually clicking and not show a captcha. However, if JavaScript is switched off you can show a captcha so that you can stop bots trying to register.

What fields did you have before your leap of faith?

Before I had image verification, and all the details required at sign up. Now users can fill in their extra details later.

I really wish that he blogged every week.

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