Why you Should Bury your Sign Up Button | Hacker News Reader

Why you Should Bury your Sign Up Button

bokardo.com

55 pointsjsavimbi28 comments

He's right. We don't care yet. If we did, we'd have searched for the signup form and used it. Pushing it in front our our faces does not help.

But you know what's even better? Let them try it without signing up, but make it easy to sign up (but not annoying!) while they try it.

>But you know what's even better? Let them try it without signing up,

Why would I try something I don't care about? The point still stands. Get them to care before you have them DO anything.

Because you were unimpressed by the text explanation but mighty be amazed by the actual "stuff".

That's hindsight. What's going to convince me to take time out of my day to try the demo to be amazed by?

Curiosity? The potential that it could help you? If it's easy enough to try, as in effortless and risk-free, you might well be tempted to give it a shot.

>Curiosity? The potential that it could help you? If it's easy enough to try, as in effortless and risk-free, you might well be tempted to give it a shot.

Those are compelling reasons for an extremely small percentage of first time visitors. Most just pad your bounce rate.

Good point, that's why I love this: http://chartbeat.com/demo/

That's a really nice feature, though it's surprisingly hard to find on their site. I wonder why they prefer to promote their Tour rather than the Live Demo (found via a small link in a list on the right rail of the Tour page).

Would be interesting if a Live Demo doesn't convert nearly as well as a Tour.

While the ideal flow/funnel is to go from persuasive copy to signup in a single visit, I've often found myself going back to a site/service multiple times over the course of months before actually signing up.

It's probably part of the multiple touch points marketing idea. You may really like a service, but have to wait until you actually come across the problem the service is solving before committing to the buy.

The point being, I think it makes sense to have a sign-up button on your landing page (for return visits) AND in your copy (for first time visitors).

I personally am very turned off by the big "Sign Up" buttons on front pages. For whatever reason it always makes me feel like I'm looking at an obnoxious panhandler who's holding a glossy sign made at Kinkos. Just put a small login/username toggle widget at the top of the page.

Good point. Trials work well in some cases, not in others. For example, for products focused on startups, trials can be very effective. For products purchased by people other than those that use them, trials simply aren't used. So...knowing if purchasers = users is important.

The tittle is a little sensationalist. This article should be about correctly informing and selling the product to the consumer. The conclusion should really be "don't think too much about the button" not "bury the button". If your single splash page really informs and sells me an obvious button is going to help. Nothing obnoxious, but there is nothing more infuriating than finding a product I like, and having difficult accessing, or signing up for it.

Agreed. I recall situations where I wanted to buy a product in the past and due to a lack of an obvious sign-up/purchase button, I left the site and forgot about it all together. Honestly, my favorite type of CTA button is one that follows me down the page. What I mean by that is that there's an obvious button at the top, but then inline with the content that explains the product (usually inline with the headline for that section's content) there's a button to sign up as well. No need to outright hide it, though.

Looks like the site is down. Here's the google cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bokardo...

Sorry about that...

Conversion rate is so much more than design:

Where are their website visitors coming from?

What is the messaging that got them there?

What are they trying to accomplish?

Does this product or service solve their problem?

Burying the sign-up button is an extremely simplistic hypothesis for a low conversion rate.

Yeah, I like to actually picture a any online transaction from retail store perspective where you have people coming in. If you have a retail store and say "Everything Free Inside" on your door, sure you may get lots of foot traffic but almost no sales and lots of pissed off people.

Sometimes you have to engage the visitor before showing a sign-up/buy button. Otherwise they expect something free, see a price, and just leave.

My conversions dropped (something like 30%-50%) when I placed the buy button above the folder vs. at the very bottom of the page.

http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper

It's perfectly reasonable to me now, but before I would have never guessed that "below the fold" was better than "above the fold" in some circumstances, considering the first one is the golden rule of conversions.

"Don't assume, and try different and contrasting things" should really be that rule.

Am I the only one who thinks perhaps his expectations were too high. I'd be extremely happy if the redesign I'm working on increased the conversion rate by 20%. How is that failure?

He was starting from extremely low numbers. " . . . the rate itself was so low to have very little effect on the company’s bottom line." 20% of a half of a percent still sucks, for instance.

right, but wouldn't low numbers to begin with indicate problems beyond just the website? What's the metric then? If the site is generating 100k a year and you bump conversions by 10% is that success? If the site is only generating 10k per year, then does conversion need to go up 50% to be considered successful?

Sorry for the site being down folks...my wordpress install is leaking serious memory somewhere and I'm restarting it every five minutes...

The name of the article should be "Why you should explain what your service does". The problem isn't that we are prematurely given a sign up button--it's that they haven't convinced the visitor that they should click it.

You should be able to make a compelling case for your product in a single page AND provide them with a clear call to action.

You really mean "Why you should explain what your service does persuasively", right?

Almost all pages have some explanation of the service. But there's a huge difference between an explanation and a compelling explanation as you point out.

It's nice that he followed his own advice. None of us knew we were reading a sales letter for his new book until the end of the blog post!

Yeah. Wonderful. Nothing says loving like a teaser of info and a "Buy The Rest" button.

And I'm sure whoever wrote the article has spent time reading free documentation, using free languages, free community specs, etc.

And he's also spent a lot of time and effort freely disseminating a lot of good information and sharing techniques based on years of fieldwork and analysis. Look him up some time.

> Let them try it without signing up

Couldn't agree more. Just yesterday I went through the exercise with a stealthy music discovery service and I paced well through the required sign-up but was then floored by the lack of usefulness that the product actually has.

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