Designing your sign up page? Read this. | Hacker News Reader

Designing your sign up page? Read this.

contrast.ie

192 pointsdestraynor21 comments

It's great -- Unfortunately I run a professional office with woman who work for me, and while they'd probably not care if I sent them an article that says "Suck Balls" at the top, I care enough not to send it.

Couldn't you be just as snarky and instead say "We do everything PayPal does except Suck?"

Just some feedback on an otherwise great post.

Hey David, I've updated it to say "Suck". I was correcting a typo so I figured why not :)

Share away now!

Regards, Des

awesome. shared!

Respectfully, the letter spacing of your main font is so wide and the word spacing so comparatively narrow it's making for slow and difficult reading for me. I can see how you may be going for a kind of spacious theme for the look of the site, but there is probably a way to do it without impeding the visual flow of the text...

None the less, I'm quite eager to get through this very interesting article, I'd just rather do it without using Readability.

(MBP/10.5.8/Safari)

I found that using webkit inspector to set the paragraph style to normal letter-spacing, 1.4em line-height helped the readability immensely. Something to consider, perhaps?

What is this PerfectPayments company you speak of and where do I sign up?

I think it is great that they have picked a fight with a competitor.

I'm pretty sure it was an allusion to WePay.

Their current website doesn't say that, but it does look similar, and their past antics have certainly snubbed PayPal.

Hey Simon,

It wasn't really an allusion. I needed a cover image, I wanted something a bit striking or funny, so I went with a sketchy version of the frame I used in the article. I just picked payment, cause I was giving out about Paypal earlier. Thanks for reading, Des

I had the same reaction, so I took a look at the style sheet. Two things struck me: line-height is 35px which is way more than the normal 16px, making it look like double space typescript. Second letter-spacing is 1.6833 which makes it look almost like a mono-spaced font. I would change fonts rather than mess with letter-spacing. The lines can be more open than 16px, but double spacing is too much. Apologies if this is too rantish.

EDIT: that aside, the content is spot on for me.

Thanks for the article - it's nice to see a counterpoint to all of the advice that focuses only on a "call to action" on the homepage and trying to get people to take it (yes, like like the rotated angled screenshot that points to the signup button :-)

Seems like the ultimate home page would provide everything a prospect needs to decide before clicking "Signup". Basically no funnel at all - Home Page ->> Signup. Nice.

Seems like the ultimate home page would provide everything a prospect needs to decide before clicking "Signup". Basically no funnel at all - Home Page ->> Signup. Nice.

That's the premise behind the (in)famous "long form", and also why they are so successful (even if generally despised.)

Yup - Ogilvys book "On Advertising" talks about this, exclaiming that good content sells better than over-simplifications.

Why the confusion? Why all the cramming of information? Yes! Good Content/Service, but also keep it simple. If I have to read a "chapter" on what you do, or play with four widgets to "learn" more, or visit your blog and troll for topics of interest, then I'm already turned off. I want to know if it's a product I can use/sign up for in less than 30 seconds -- speaking of which, there's a good chance you'll snag me if I'm 30 seconds in and still with you.

Yeah, I loved this article especially because of the "mythbusting" it does. We've been working on designing our sign-up page for a while, and a whole lot of the conventional wisdom doesn't seem to take into account actual user behavior.

The logged-out homepage that we have put together should provide potential users with enough information to sell them on the quality of our content and usefulness of our product before they even get to the sign-up page.

Nevertheless, it's always great to get more insight on this all-important element of design.

I'll tell you what doesn't work: changing a simple design and burying things in layers. Facebook and now Google Mail is guilty of burying "logoff" in a drop down box. Give me a break, putting it in a drop down box doesn't keep me from logging off, it only annoys me.

Make it obvious and easy to use and resist the urge to fk with it. I can name many other examples. Central Desktop also comes to mind.

Des- this thing was spot on. I just got done reading "Made to Stick" and think their point about being concrete vs. generic directly relates to your ideas. Ex: "Its very easy" vs "It's easier than tying your shoes"

Thanks for this!

Great article. It is easy to get caught up in the chasing the best presentation, but if you don't have a great product and the information to support it no one will listen.

interesting Des, your presentation on tuesday at DWS was thought provoking

Cheers Maxer. Good clean useful thoughts I hope :)

always love your facebook slide :)

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