Stop making me sign up | Hacker News Reader

Stop making me sign up

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210 pointsfonziguy139 comments

"If we use gradual engagement, we will have more, higher quality signups" is a testable hypothesis. It has been tested, by many companies. I regret that I am not at liberty to disclose most specific results, but gradual engagement is really tricky to pull off well, and has often roundly failed compared to the traditional get-their-email-first signup screen. This is true even at companies which don't do anything very sophisticated with the email address once they have it, which is (IMHO) generally a mistake in the sort of markets I usually work in.

The one product I can talk about: Back in the day, Bingo Card Creator had one-click guest accounts. Their conversion rate was 2. Not two percent. Two. Ever. They were a cause of a stupendous portion of my support burden. (From the perspective of most of my users gradual engagement means "The Googles ate my work and now you have ruined the day of a room full of third graders, you monster.") The engineering to support them was fiddly, and ripping it out made the application better. (Despite several attempts to improve them I don't think I ever had near the UX work invested to make the experience not be awful. Again, gradual engagement UX is quite challenging. In particular, the handoff between guest accounts and "real" trial accounts is of paramount importance to my business but is meaningless to customers who have guest accounts until they get to school, at which point they will often discover, to their surprise, that failing to make the decision yesterday to give me their email address now means their cards are totally inaccessible. I never successfully figured out a way -- copy, design, workflow, etc -- to avoid having huge numbers of people fail at this use case.)

Discontinuing guest accounts increased signups of "real" accounts and also sales, if I remember correctly. You can eyeball the signup graph here http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-day Apologies in advance for the unclear axes -- that page hasn't had the underlying code updated in years, and I didn't even consider "Hey if I run this business for forever eventually that axis is going to get crowded."

I think most of this anti-registration sentiment is coming from places like Quora which force you to register for no good reason, not sites that have a valid reason for an account. (I've never heard someone complain about needing to sign up to use Amazon.)

GlassDoor is particularly obnoxious (as I just found out yesterday). If you click on this link http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm all data will show. If you click almost any link or simply refresh the page, it's all hidden, blurred, and you get greeted with an overlay saying you must sign up.

Issues with Quora aside, I think it's actually coming from people inside the bubble of startups/design/ux who want to complain without actually testing things.

I often show my wife sites/apps that might interest her. I've never heard her complain about creating an account (either with email/pw or facebook). If they drip-spam her, she'll unsubscribe. She's not a designer or hacker–just a normal 30-something, slightly-entrepreneurial, facebook-gmail-mac-using wife-mom.

I don't trust websites to not spam me and I don't trust them to not share my email with other spammers. I would never give my email to some unknown character. It's not an unreasonable position.

I have many email addresses. Some I use exclusively for things like signups, messages to which are diverted to particular folder on my mail client. I only ever dip into that folder to click activation links and password resets. Getting spam to those addresses has zero negative impact on me. I would have imagined this behavior is quite common.

I suspect it's not as common as you think. I have many email addresses, and a couple of my friends (who work in tech) do, but the vast majority of the people I know only have one (or two, if they have one leftover from school, etc.).

I've long since given up on that. I plaster my email address al over the internet, so that people can contact me. It means I get spam of course, but that's what spam filters were invented to deal with. Very little actual spam ends up in my inbox.

If you need to keep your email address secret, I suggest that you're doing the internet wrong.

Yes, everyone who disagrees with you is doing the internet wrong. FFS

Here is my trick for this: I use an individual email address for each signup I do, in the form of <signupdomain.com>@mydomain.com. By that way, when I get spam, I don't only know the spams source, but I can block it with only one click by blacklisting the specific receiver email address.

Your N=1 study does not provide statistically useful results.

Agreed. There is a reason I actively participate in StackOverflow and have Quora in my Google search block list.

I apreciate Glassdoor trying to force people to answer questions about their companies. That's how we can all find out about industry patterns.

It kind of sucks if you are the only employee of a certain class in a company doing an "anonymous" review of your employer.

I assume you mean Amazon services like EC2. Because there is no reason you should need to create an account to buy something on Amazon.com.

Depends. Providing the option to cancel an order necessitates authentication. E-mail updates on your order are also nice. Where do draw the line between purchase-time and lifetime user state?

I used Glassdoor to get a rough idea of what salary to ask for when I moved countries. Same issue as you. It massively peevs me when I want to download a free-to-try piece of software, or a whitepaper and they require my email address so they can mail me the link.

So I did what I always do when something that shouldn't seemingly require an email address, forces me to register. I used a disposable email address (Yopmail is my favourite one :))

Did it add any value to process? Not particularly. If I like what you have to offer, then I will go back and sign-up for the newsletters, until then, stop filling up my inbox with random rubbsih!

Funny: Amazon (and Newegg) were actually the sites I thought of that do this very well. I can shop around, add things to cart, get recommendations based on my shopping history, everything really, until checkout time. At that point it becomes reasonable to make an account.

If Amazon did what a lot of sites do that I come across -- that is shove a monsterous sign-in form first thing then start asking me for referrals -- that would be a total turn off.

I would be annoyed if I had to sign up/login to Amazon just to look at what they sell.

The main factor with gradual engagement bringing higher quality signups I would assume is with how often of exposure you can have to the future potential user - in a non-intrusive way. Seeing someone using an iPhone, who then shows you something on it - or shows the phone off to you - would be an example of this.

You could force them to sign up once they've used the guest account long enough to risk losing their work.

How about the Mailinator model: ask them to name their account. Give them a pre-populated randomly generated name in the dialog box, even.

The conflation of naming with personal data capture is a hidden assumption in the conventional signup. You want my email. You want my unique identity. But why collect them at once?

Edit: in fact, even better, pre populate the name with something random and quirky from instant zero. So your work starts out when you click "new" being named something like "goldfish-apple-gasoline" and it supports an obvious "rename" operation if they want to take control of it.

So your work starts out when you click "new" being named something like "goldfish-apple-gasoline" and it supports an obvious "rename" operation if they want to take control of it.

You're welcome to implement this in your own product. You will almost certainly receive emails about "I just tried logging in using the same email address I've used for 8 years and it doesn't work. Why is your website broken?"

(This is true of any website which supports standard logins and any additional method, by the way. If you have standard logins and Facebook accounts, people will sign up with FB and then try logging in standard, etc etc.)

Aha, interesting.

One pattern I've noticed repeatedly is that websites with both Facebook and conventional signup options convert worse than websites with just a conventional signup. I'd assumed that was the usual "don't give people choice" issue, but I'd not considered the confusion problem.

This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the service is and how it works without giving up your contact info.

So instead of giving the user a chance to be sold on what you're selling, you've just turned them away before they can even learn what your pitch is. You've killed an opportunity for word of mouth as well.

Maybe the idea is to select for users who are so eager to learn about your service that they'll give you their email first. Maybe that kind of customer is worth a lot more money.

But I think many people have marketing fatigue at this point, and are only going to sign up for things they know they're interested in. I mean, I wouldn't give my contact info to a store that doesn't even let me into the door until I fork over some info.

> This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the service is and how it works without giving up your contact info.

That's because of a truth about the modern Internet, which sounds like an old truism about card-playing: if you can't figure out what the product is, you're the product.

I think that's definitely the case with free services. But I've even seen some paid services that pull this trick. Take Frank & Oak for instance. I've seen a lot of ads for them and I have some vague idea that it's a fashion service for men.

How does it work? How much does it cost? I have no idea, I have to sign up to figure it out.

> I think that's definitely the case with free services. But I've even seen some paid services that pull this trick.

That's because they all want to hook up, maybe sell you something, and avoid a problem with the Can-Spam Act, to wit: if they e-mail you and you're not a customer, they're in violation, it's spam. If you have signed up, you're a customer, so the Can-Spam Act no longer applies -- they can e-mail you all they want.

The really sleazy outfits are those that spam you, and include an opt-out link in the spam mailing. You click the link, which takes you to a sign-up page. The idea is, if you sign up, what you got isn't spam any more -- by signing up, you turn it into a legitimate business contact.

The fact that the op-out-link goes to a signup page technically violates the Can-Spam Act (which requires that an opt-out procedure be both prominent and simple), but it seems no one cares about that any more.

For such "optouts", the "report spam" button works as intended. If I didn't opt-in to the mailings, it's ethically spam (even if I'm your customer), and thus all your emails rightfully should be treated as emails from a known intentional spammer.

That's the way I've always looked at it, but the Can-Spam Act perversely legitimizes what once would have been regarded as spam, and that to many, still is.

Also, when people opt-out, what's to stop one business from sharing the addresses of opt-outs with another business, who then can drink from the same well? This is a glaring flaw in Can-Spam commented on by many, and it's why a number of influential organizations argued that it shouldn't have been made into law in the first place:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/113137/article.html

Quote: "The Senate unanimously approved the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act last week. It requires e-mail users to opt out of unwanted commercial e-mail, instead of requiring e-mail senders to get permission before sending. That approach is backwards, say vendors of antispam technologies and at least one consumer advocacy group."

This is a problem with a social/technical solution. As you say, according to Can-Spam act it's legal to send spam to people who haven't opted out.

On the other hand, it is also legal and ethical to make a list of which senders are sending spam to people who haven't opted in, and try to filter out all messages from such spammers.

> On the other hand, it is also legal and ethical to make a list of which senders are sending spam to people who haven't opted in, and try to filter out all messages from such spammers.

Yes, that's true, and IMHO admirable. The difference is that people who send spam are organized and have substantial resources. Organizations like Spamhaus (which do exactly what you suggest) are under constant threat of extinction by well-heeled adversaries.

http://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/698/

Quote: "The Spamhaus Project offers congratulations and its sincere thanks to the Dutch Public Prosecution Service (OM), the Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) of the Dutch Police Services Agency (KLPD), the Spanish National Police (Catalonia branch in collaboration with the Central UDEF), and any and all other entities involved in the recent arrest announced in regard to the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Spamhaus in March 2013."

The bottom line is that it's an uphill battle to fight organizations who have both resources and ill-advised laws on their side.

I'd like to add a little data to this discussion, from the perspective of someone with a minimal landing page that makes you sign up.

We (https://workflowy.com) built a try-first sign up flow, and a/b tested it against our current minimal signup page, which is a lot like those you describe.

Unfortunately, the try-first performed FAR worse. Not only did we get fewer signups (which we expected). The engagement rate for users who had tried first was significantly LOWER. Exact same product. Same first time experience. One group tried before signing up, the other didn't. They liked it less. Isn't that odd?

From my understanding, other services have experienced this same phenomenon. Why does this happen? It is hard to explain. It could be some aspect of our try-first design was flawed. But, my guess is that it's something psychological about signing up.

I had expected and hoped that the try-first flow would improve word of mouth. I think many do. But it didn't. So I'd encourage as many people to bring data to the table as possible. I've found through doing tons of a/b tests that metrics often don't obey my logic.

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing your data.

There is something about having to put in a little effort up front, and giving up a little, that commits a user to try harder to use a service.

I wonder if this phenomenon is a cousin of the well known characteristic that non-paying users tend to be more demanding and less appreciative of a given service than those who pay (premium users).

Thanks for sharing the information. I guess you are right, it is psychological. It is possible that two reasons contribute: time investment in the sign up that increases the value of the service and feeling of having personal space on the website.

One key difference with what you've done though, is that through a link on the bottom I can at least figure out what your product does and see a sample workflow. Some of these sign up landing pages have nothing in the way of explaining what something is.

But maybe what companies are finding is that people respond more strongly when details are withheld from them.

true. that link at the bottom, though, is recent. we used to have zero demonstrations outside the video.

The homepage for workflowy has 5 input fields (3 e-mail fields and 2 password fields), two buttons, and a forgot password link. With a little ingenuity, you can reduce this to two fields and one button (hint: "Sign Up / Sign In").

So a mistake should create a new account rather than throw an error?

Regarding the e-mail/password combination:

1. Valid account: sign in, done.

2. Invalid account: redirect to Sign Up page, currying the e-mail and hashed password.

Chances are the user's browser has already saved the account details and will auto-populate the credentials on subsequent visits, thereby reducing mistakes during sign in.

Integrate a service like http://www.mailgun.com/ to validate that the e-mail address is correct, and not a mistake, which should prevent 99.9% of accidental invalid account creations.

Another personal pet peeve with sign up forms is when asked for Country, Province, and Postal Code. Ask for the Postal Code first and then auto-fill the other two. You can even throw in MaxMind's GeoIP to make a best guess at City, Province, and Country. It's minimal effort for streamlined account creation.

Could it be that those who took the time to sign up cared more about the service in the first place (hence, they were willing to sign up)? In other words, is a sign up process (even a minimal one) basically a weed-out for those who are more ambivalent about your offering?

That still doesn't explain why, on average, those who sign up in the no-trial scenerio are more active than those who sign up after trying the product. Of both groups that sign up, the ones without a chance to try the product were more active (including all the activity during the trial)

>"That still doesn't explain why, on average, those who sign up in the no-trial scenerio are more active than those who sign up after trying the product..."

Couldn't it though? If people were so convinced that they didn't need a trial, could it mean they felt themselves to be a better fit for the product. Kind of like an "I've been waiting for something just like this...don't need to try it...I know I want it".

Whereas a trial might reflect some ambivalence by definition: "Not so sure. But, maybe I'll give it a try."

Selection bias. When you make people sign up first, only people who are really interested are going to bother. Most people will just leave. When you let them try it first, all the people who wouldn't have tried it at all in the sign up first model are now trying it and going "meh".

Interesting. One opposite experience: anonymous Wikipedia editing.

Most registered Wikipedians today (59%) say they edited anonymously before registering. That doesn't mean they all necessarily did, but it suggests it's being used in this "try before you buy" way. One piece of data that backs this up for us...

If you're anonymous, there is a call to action on the edit window that informs you're not logged in, and invites you to sign up. That one small link on the edit interface is 9% of all signups on English Wikipedia, and these users have a much higher first time edit rate. On some other language Wikipedias, like Spanish and Japanese, it's even higher -- between 10 and 20% of all signups. I find this somewhat boggling, because in theory it's a horrible experience to interrupt people mid-edit.

I think your tests with Workflowly and the first commenters examples are still correct by and large. Getting users to commit after they try something without signup is tricky, and you lose the ability to easily call them back via email.

For me, the larger lesson is that you need to test this rigorously and be prepared for either approach to fail. It all depends on your product and what your users are like. Turns out many successful Wikipedians are the type who love to dive right in and change things. People who declare that either approach is always going to be superior are falling prey to a bad assumption about how all products and users are alike.

yeah, agreed. i'm sure it will work better in some cases, but it's really specific to each situation.

Quote: "99% of sites/apps/services we visit now make you register and go through an on-boarding process before getting to the meat of the product."

That's because signing up is the product. The touted "product" is a fiction, a pander to get you to sign up. Another way to say this is you are the product, the advertised "product" is just bait to lure you in.

If you haven't signed up and the company e-mails you, they're in violation of the Can-Spam Act. Once you've signed up, you become a customer, a category excluded from the sanctions of the Can-Spam Act. So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the only thing.

I wish people who wrote articles like the linked one actually knew something -- that might make their articles worth reading.

"So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the only thing."

Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not. If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up? If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want to use your app ? It doesn't. Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying customer or an active user. That is what matters not just a sign-up.

Believe it or not, a lot of people are reactivated by post sign-up emails. This gets them to return to a site they probably forgot about. It lets them get a second impression assuming they care.

"A lot of people" does not include the typical Hacker News user.

Totally correct. HN users aren't not the typical 'normal' person. We are often in a bubble and forget that 'cool' UX improvements don't often meet the expectations of new users because they've been fed a diet of unusable shit for so long that any deviation from such is met with confusion. Such as not requiring a password confirmation for example. They're so used to it that it throws them when you don't ask for it.

You have to turn it around and think like a marketer: even if you don't want to use the app, even if you don't know what the app/site does, if you sign up, it's for you. You've contributed a snippet of data to the people concerned with that site/app that you are interested in whatever they have (no matter how vaguely it's portrayed), and associated it with an email address. That snippet of data has actual economic value in the right hands.

> Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not.

It may not matter to you, but it certainly matters to them. If you sign up, you become a customer.

> If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up?

Try to think like the site operator. They know they don't have anything interesting to offer you, but you certainly have something interesting to offer them: your identity.

> If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want to use your app?

Who cares? The point is to get you to sign up, reveal your personal information, not to offer you anything useful for your trouble.

> Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying customer or an active user.

You clearly don't understand how the Can-Spam Act works. The Can-Spam Act doesn't apply to people who are customers, i.e. people who have signed up. So by signing up, you've given permission to be spammed perpetually.

Respectfully, I think your view is overly cynical, and applies to a very small number of services out there that truly provide no value and exist solely for the purpose of harvesting E-mail addresses and SPAMming.

For most operators with a genuine product, the push to get you to register is neither 100% for your benefit nor 100% for theirs.

> For most operators with a genuine product ...

Those sites can prove their sincerity by telling you what they offer before asking for a signup. But that's not the topic under discussion.

> Try to think like the site operator. They know they don't have anything interesting to offer you ...

Remind me never to sign up for anything you create. It seems you have a hard time getting your head around the fact that many "site operators" try to solve real problems by building services to do so. And I might venture to say they believe their site is even more than just "something interesting to offer" - but something valuable or useful to make your life/work easier or more efficient.

> Remind me never to sign up for anything you create.

My site is completely free, no ads, no promotions, and no signups (http://arachnoid.com/). And believe me when I tell you, many people find my site useful. People regularly send me unsolicited checks, which I tear up. You were saying?

> It seems you have a hard time getting your head around the fact that many "site operators" try to solve real problems by building services to do so.

The topic under discussion is sites that require you to sign up before showing you what they have to offer. For those sites, my doubts are fully justified.

> ... but something valuable or useful to make your life/work easier or more efficient.

If they believed that, they would show you what they have to offer before encouraging a signup. But that's not the topic of this thread.

Your site is a blog

Because I don't have anything for sale or require a signup? That's circular reasoning. If someone creates a site that isn't commercial, doesn't advertise anything, and doesn't require a signup, it's inevitably dismissed as a mere comment forum, regardless of its content. It's not defined by what it is, it's defined by what it isn't.

Bloggers don't offer popular -- not to say famous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnophilia) -- programs for download. My site does. Bloggers don't offer online applications with wide acceptance (http://arachnoid.com/latex). My site does.

My site, online since 1996, had its present form before the term "blog" had its present meaning. All that has changed is it has more content people find useful.

The design certainly looks like it started in 1996. I visited the site and still have no idea how it's any different than a Tumblr blog.. Other than decreased organization and usability of course. Also we're talking about the topic of gradual engagement. Your site has pretty much no engagement other than hundreds of blog posts and a sidebar full of unorganized links. The OP was discussing businesses-- meaning the sales of a product or service. Your site doesn't qualify as such, or if it does, the value proposition is so horribly obscured as to make it undetectable. I'm not knocking your site, but it's hardly a relevant example in this discussion. If it is selling a product or a service, then it's a great case study on what not to do in terms of selling your product.

> I visited the site and still have no idea how it's any different than a Tumblr blog.

Yes, it's clear you have no idea.

> The OP was discussing businesses ...

It seems, as has often been said, to a hammer everything looks like a nail. If it's not a business, in the modern Internet, it has no right to exist, because in the modern Internet, everything is a business. As I already said, it's circular reasoning.

You may be surprised to learn that the internet was once a gathering place for intelligent people, not a perpetual electronic strip mall.

> Also we're talking about the topic of gradual engagement.

To which "we" does that refer? The topic is sites that require signups before revealing content.

> I'm not knocking your site ...

No, of course not. Who would think that?

> ... but it's hardly a relevant example in this discussion.

No, because I don't require people to sign up. Do you have any idea how you sound?

> If it is selling a product or a service, then it's a great case study on what not to do in terms of selling your product.

You just made my argument for me. There's nothing I need to add. With a little more effort, you could make racism respectable.

For the record, my site gets a huge amount of daily traffic and has an enviable pagerank of 6/10.

So what's your business model? Do you actually sell anything? No ads, no signup, no promotions.. Does it actually make any money? The entire point of a business is to make money, so I wonder how you do that.

> So what's your business model?

What? Do you really think the entire Internet is a business, or that the Internet is defined by its similarity to a business?

Your reasoning is circular: My site isn't a business, but everything is a business, and the entire point of a business is to make money, but my site doesn't make money.

You're trying to to offer the fact that I don't have signups as proof that my site isn't real. To a hammer, everything is judged by its similarity to a nail.

I saw this coming years ago, at a time when people designed Websites for any number of reasons -- before the Internet had become a virtual strip mall.

> The entire point of a business is to make money, so I wonder how you do that.

This may be futile, but just for the record, you need to examine your assumptions. Not all racehorses are platypuses.

Nope. That entirely depends on the service. Most saas I use for marketing and programming sends 95% transactional emails and 5% promotional emails.

The most important aspec is that a user invests his time and effort in the service and after time using the service becomes an important habit that provides productivity, entertainment or just attacks your limbic system to optimize for user pleasure. And that habit allows to monetize effeciently.

That's not really true. There are plenty of services which exist to sell you things that still make you sign up.

> There are plenty of services which exist to sell you things that still make you sign up.

My point is that sites with something useful to offer wouldn't take the risk of creating the bad impression the original poster complained about.

"Stop making testable claims without evidence."

"Stop making absolute claims about things that may only be true sometimes."

"Stop assuming what frustrates you frustrates everyone."

"Stop thinking that other people cannot see 'obvious' design flaws like you can and didn't think through the tradeoffs involved."

This article makes points that sound fine on the surface, but ignore reality. There's a very good reason why a lot of sites do this and won't stop any time soon--it works. The article claims some effects to "conversions, usage and how people feel about your product" but is very light on the details of how it actually affects those things.

Getting a user to sign up facilitates a whole range of options (promotional emails being just one of them) that help drive user retention and engagement. I am not advocating making your product obscure until they sign up. The value proposition of your product should be clear, regardless of whether someone signs up or not. But it is not clear that making them signup before they can actually use it for themselves decreases conversion or usage.

The complaint made here will become ever weaker as "Sign Up with Google" and other single-sign-on services become more widespread. Signing up in those cases takes a single click, and my experience is in many cases instantly personalized with my data from other services. This might make some HN denizens cringe, but the average person seems to not mind.

I don't understand why the parent is getting downvoted. It is one of the few rational, realistic posts so far in this discussion. [Edit: In the time it took to write this post, a few other people now seem to have expressed similar views.]

Of course visitors would rather try everything for free indefinitely and never give anything up in return. That's obvious.

On the other hand, in today's world, web sites are often transient things you find via social networks and search engines and visit only briefly the first time. Even if you find a site interesting, if you forget to bookmark it somewhere obvious or you found it at work but get distracted by the time you reach home, you might never think to go back. From the site owner's point of view, if subsequent more deeply engaged visits never happen and they have no way of re-engaging with genuine prospective customers, they could be losing a huge proportion of their potential revenues.

There's always a balancing act in these things, trying to demonstrate enough value to a prospect as easily as possible that they engage, yet not giving away so much that they have little incentive to engage and don't see enough extra value to justify becoming a paying customer. Trying to get people to sign up when they don't even know what you do yet is probably not a good strategy, but neither is letting them see so much that they wind up just circulating around your site and never converting.

Ultimately, if being a little more aggressive about getting people to the next stage of conversion puts some people off, that's good. Those people probably weren't going to sign up anyway, and all they were doing was wasting your resources and polluting your data about genuine prospects. It sounds harsh and unpleasant to say it so bluntly, but it's probably the reality if you're running a modern commercial site that offers genuine value but isn't an essential service where visitors are certain to come looking again later.

It can cost real money foregone as the $300 million button article showed http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

On the weekend I decided to try some boots from Zappos. They were bought by Amazon 4 years ago, and have "legendary" customer service. Not in my experience. You can login with your Amazon account, but then it asks for your name. Strange. I go to checkout and they want my billing name, street, city, zip, state, same for shipping, card number, expiry, cvc and who knows what else. Turns out that they aren't integrated with Amazon in any meaningful way.

I sent them an email about it - maybe I'd missed something. I got some nonsense explanation about it being for my security. Then they started spamming me about the abandoned shopping cart. At this point I discovered that each cs rep has some "humourous" boilerplate about how they are going to help you, before doing something completely unhelpful. They also don't keep track of replies (an id in the subject or just looking at the in-reply-to header would work) so each one starts a new ticket where a different rep doesn't look at the history and does a completely different unhelpful thing. I've now asked 3 times that they delete my account.

Wow that's awful. I do hope amazon is working on it. They're usually pretty big on interconnectivity between their services.

Sometimes, yes. But there are a lot of services where you do need an account to try it at all -- how are you going to try out Mint, or Duolingo, or Path, or OkCupid, without creating an account first?

Obviously you can create "dummy accounts", but they often won't actually give a decent idea of the site's experience (browsing profiles on OkCupid doesn't give you anywhere near the experience of having people message you), and then how is the person going to convert their dummy account into a real one later on, if they never even put in their e-mail or password?

There are certainly plenty of times when sites go overboard in asking too much of you up-front, but it's not always the case.

Absolutely. I think Chartbeat does a good job of showing you the product before signing up https://chartbeat.com/demo and also https://www.intercom.io/ have a great gradual engagement flow (where they actually need data to work effectively).

I can think of examples of most of those or similar services where either anonymous or test-account demos were available. Which is also, incidentally, a good way to test/check your own code.

Actually, I think OkCupid would be a good candidate for gradual engagement. Letting you browse profiles before creating an account could make it easier to see what sort of people are on the site, what sort of work you'll have to do to write a profile, and generally set your expectations for what it's like to have an account there.

For this to work, you'd have to let your users opt-in to making their profiles public. Nothing stops a search engine crawler at this stage from caching everything, and most dating site users want their privacy. I don't think this would work.

Most(not all) search engine crawlers seem to obey robots.txt's "Disallow: /" in my experience. But beyond that, maybe the preview mode of the site should be done in a way to make crawlers/webscrapers return worthless results. Like make the no-sign-up site not work without javascript or constantly request captchas with annoying frequency. For a dating site, I'd assume no-sign-up mode shouldn't show any detail about the signed-up people beyond city/state, age & profile-picture.

> constantly request captchas with annoying frequency

That's an anti-pattern that would annoy me more than the few minutes it would take to create an account.

Like this? http://www.okcupid.com/online-dating/san-francisco/californi...

I just don't see it linked to for people who visit the site without accounts. (A user has the option of making their profile public or private.) I've heard they are working on a site redesign, though, so maybe it will show up then.

Females do not want their dating profiles visible by anybody except genuinely intersted and verified visitors. A major part of ok cupids system is that it tracks views and informs the people WHO checked you out. The other dynamic is that people are shy and they need to be pushed to set up a visible profile quickly before they lose confidence. At that point they are contactable and datable.

So no guest mode for OK Cupid.

in other words: no wallflowers

Mint could let you use a couple calculators, you'd just have to enter all the information each time.

Duolingo could let you do a lesson before signing up.

OkCupid could let you browse a limited number of profiles - it's better than nothing, and certainly useful in giving you an idea of the clientele.

The problem with having gradual engagement in something like OkCupid would be that the threat of a scammy bait and switch happening to you. For instance you'd be browsing the limited (curated / highest voted) list of people in your area, and then when you go to sign up they are no longer there or unavailable.

Given how much word-of-mouth business they must get, I'd hope that there would be strong disincentives against scumminess of that sort.

Another potential alternative: local accounts.

I worked on a site that's very privacy-oriented and users were still asking for accounts. We didn't want to store their information on our servers. Instead, we use localstorage to keep their settings and a list of things they've uploaded. They don't even have to sign in, and they still get the same experience. Try it: https://mediacru.sh

It obviously won't work for everyone, but if you just want to offer users a means to keep track of what they've been doing on your site, consider going locally.

Have you had any issues with folks who switch browsers or computers not seeing their localstorage (which doesn't sync/migrate, IIRC)? I suppose highly-privacy-oriented users would prefer it that way...

Sorry for the late response - the answer is no. We haven't received any complaints yet. However, we don't have the greatest of followings, so there aren't a lot of users to complain to us.

I don't mind that. What bothers me is not knowing what a service actually does. Either no summary on their website, or what is much more common -- in follow-up e-mails.

I sign up for a service, or an invite for a service, or even just for a launch announcement, and weeks or months later get an e-mail that makes no mention of what is being touted.

But it's a plague in general. It's very common that Wikipedia has better descriptions of companies or software projects, even their commercial offering than the official website.

Try looking up which language some piece of software is written in. Often, googling it + github and then clicking on the repo breakdown is the easiest way to find out.

This was a major reason for creating my board game web site, BreakBase ( http://www.breakbase.com ). All I wanted to do was play a board game against my friend, and not have to worry about all of the nuances of making an account. Just share a link and play a game. Making an account is an after-thought, if you like using the service.

edit: hyperlinks, how do they work?

Just like to say that I love this concept.

Users expect to register. I've seen UX lab studies testing it, without registration users get really confused and don't understand what's happening with their data.

Conversion can actually drop heavily with non-registration approaches.

Obviously it depends on the app, one where you only need to use it once you can and probably should design your UX to not need it. But if your app actually needs to maintain user state over multiple sessions then creating a user makes a lot of sense.

(Although you can build up user profile over time rather than requiring it upfront)

We tried this with the web app launcher at https://starthq.com. Visitors could create their app launcher before signing up.

It did not work as expected as users were confused and few completed the process. Right now we ask for the email up front, but don't demand that the email is verified by clicking the link we send them. This works much better and we're seeing more than two thirds of the users coming back after the initial visit.

I very often turn away from sites that ask me to sign up. It doesn't matter how interested I am, if you ask me to sign up without allowing me to see what I came to see, I will go away and forget I ever heard about you.

So true; imgur should be mentioned as a service that offers great value without asking you to sign up.

I started urgeous.com with the same idea: blogging without signup. It got zero traction and was/is maybe too complex to use as it is but I still believe in the idea! ;-)

Service works. It's pretty nice. Here's some suggestions:

* The <title> tag doesn't get the subject line.

* I want a readable url. I would assume that my test url p34t3aaa44n could be a bit simpler. After all, the whole of YouTube is 11 characters. Something like /p34t3a/Title would be awesome. In base64 with 6 digit ids you still have a namespace of 68.7 billion posts.

* There should be special markup just for your site. Here's an idea, something like:

[theme:moonlight]

Look at the nice darkness.

* I don't use signatures but many do. This will be a hassle for them.

* And finally, choose a different name. As an American at least, "Urgeous" sounds awful. Something more in-tune to what the site is would be great. I spent about 10 seconds doing some whois queries; emailpos.com is closer to what I'd be expecting - and it's available. Smash two words together, drop a vowel; all the cool kids are doing it.

As a marketer, I see the temptation. Whether you like it or not, the things that you sign up for are more sticky, regardless of how good the product is.

It takes a leap of faith as a marketer to let you see a product without getting a way to get you back first. What marketers need to realize is that if you force people to sign up first they will leave in droves before they have any idea what you've created.

I think the optimal landing page is "create an account" with a way to bypass and "see it first."

We implemented this with Decal about year ago with an online tour that requires no signup[1]. We initially had an online tour which not only required signup but verified your email.

Not only did this mean fewer people would try it out, but it meant we got a great deal of disposable emails.

Our motivation was obvious: we wanted the free tour to get leads. Each time someone created an account to test, some resources were consumed so we needed to make sure we got a "high value" lead with a valid email.

When I watched Kevin Hale's Mixergy interview he talks about the fact that when they first launched the idea of Wufoo on their blog particletree they didn't even have a backend. It just demonstrated to people what it was like to use.

We were inspired by that when creating our own tour and we created a way to communicate the benefits our product offers for both deployment and end user interface in a frontend application that requires no signup or account creation.

Interestingly, not only do we get a better quality of email now, but about 50% of people who take the tour, put their email address in even though we only ask for it at the end.

[1]http://www.decalcms.com/

I'm not sure I understand why you would require an email to see a product tour???? I've reread your post 2x and it is not clear. If this is the case, I agree - bad idea.

Another thing you can do as incremental is provide dummy data or fixed queries which give them a taste of the UI but not with their data.

If you are not making sign-up mandatory, you would not be able to validate the pain point of the problem. People normally would give you their email address(or even pay through their credit card) if you are solving burning problem for them. For self funded start-ups, this may not work.

However, this technique discussed in the article may work for consumer start-ups where you think of making money later and your present problem is to get millions of users.I assume you have sufficient runway(could be in the form of venture funding) to follow this approach.

Exactly - if someone won't even register to create an account, there is almost zero chance they are going to fork over their credit card info at some point in the future. Asking for registration validates they will take some small step toward becoming a customer.

Like nearly everyone else, I despise going through the registration process on every site I try. But certain applications simply don't work without registration. Actually, lots of applications don't. I recently started working on a tiny web app (http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer) that lets you find your computer if it's lost or stolen, and by its very nature it's quite useless if you can't log in to see your device's location (and it's absurdly revealing if you alternatively display a page with thousands of names and corresponding coordinates). Since many sites simply wouldn't work without registration, I propose that we make registration more painless (maybe get rid of the whole email requirement and instead delete accounts that don't verify with email if they are clearly spammers or inactive) or, when a registration-free trial is not viable due to the nature of the application, we could design sites with a demo feature or demo video.

Does anyone else find it ironic that there are so many articles bemoaning the annoyances of web services written on the web service Medium?

good point, but isn't more that the Medium staff, probably all web developers, is highlighting these types of posts?

I've written about basketball and other subjects and they literally get 0 views.

I suppose for me there are several categories.

1) If other data or significant user input of any sort is required or possible get a log in so that progress can be recovered. Shopping is probably an exception, I don't generally want an account just to buy the thing.

2) If it is a webservice or API or something similar I won't sign up generally until I have seen a) the pricing b) some documentation and c) had the option to review the terms of service. Going back to an earlier post today about improper use of Google's maps API. Don't hide your sales information (and that includes technical documentation) behind a sign in without a good reason.

3) In some cases I understand the the email address and permission to send me further marketing is the price of access to some information. I understand this and if the offer is good enough I may expect although I will probably decline four out of five times.

Umm.. you are missing a huge part of the psychology behind incremental buy-in. Think about it a bit. If someone let you test drive a Ferrari for a year would you ever be inclined to buy it? Why right. But if you had 20 friends tell you something is amazing and you should buy it and you will be amazed, chances are you will be intrigued and much more likely to put your money down. SaaS/cloud products are much harder to sell IMO than downloadable software too. We used to use the analogy that if someone is downloading your software we are getting an invitation into someone's front door to sell them on the product's virtues. With SaaS, the sales scenario is kin to trying to sell via product display in a crowded mall. Sensory overload with too many different options to distract someone's attention.

Well, I'm building a dating site as a hobby project. I could add a "Just try without an account" option but then, there's still a rather long form to fill to decide who the user should be connected with. Removing only two fields doesn't seem like a very good idea in this case.

Instead of abandoning the registration, maybe it could be streamlined to make it easier for the user.

In many cases it would be enough to just ask for user's email address. Giving just some email address would allow me in to service and I could start using it. On the background the system would send me the standard welcome message via email, but that would not require any immediate action from my behalf.

If I decided to become a regular user, I could then setup my password on the service. Maybe the system could point out in the UI that I'm not yet fully registered.

In case I forgot the whole thing and tried to use the same email to log on the service next week, the service would remind me that this email is already in use and ask me to go through the verification process to setup a password.

2013 and we still haven't really gotten to a good, universal single-sign on system.

OpenID seemed like it was going to get us there (at least to me), but nowadays many sites moved away in favour of Google or Facebook or Twitter specific logins, often asking for a little more rights than I'm comfortable giving them.

Still, anything is better than signing up to a site with a username and password, and receiving a mail with your account info in plain text. Since the LinkedIn and Twitter hacks, I've lost faith in the backend developers to treat the storage of account info with the respect they deserve. (at least use a hash and a unique salt per user...)

The solution is already here but is still beta: Mozilla Persona (previously known as browserid)

Interesting, I hadn't seen Persona before (I associated it with their previous "Firefox Persona" skinning system.

Great example of try first, signup later that I coincidentally just discovered is Litmus' email rendering preview system - https://litmus.com/email-testing

They go quite far with it, which was really nice for my specific use case, allowing me to share the results with my team before proceeding with registration.

Now it begs the question whether or not I'll come back later to signup for the service, but regardless they've left a fantastic impression on me as a potential future user.

I suspect we don't hate signing up as much as the OP posits. I particularly dislike the shopping sites such as One Kings Lane that required singnup/login just to browse, but apparently OKL is doing something right since it I believe it's a "leader".

On the contrary, Stripe's guest access always struck me as very odd, and unlikely to be copied. For payments, I'd rather go ahead and signup to get my sandbox account.

I think Apple's app review guidelines help somewhat in this regard. They specifically forbid apps from requiring registration in order to work. I have had several apps rejected for this reason, and am now careful to always offer a path into apps that can be taken without signing up for an account.

Of course, they seem to enforce this irregularly, but at least their policy indicates they seem get it.

My home/lifestyle social networking app for iOS, Let's Go Home (https://letsgohomeapp.com), requires sign up to work. So do Facebook, Twitter, Path, and dozens of other apps.

iPhone apps that require me to signup or log into Facebook quickly get deleted.

If I recall, Pandora has a relatively gentle onboarding. You can start a new station without being logged in and it's not until you interact with the site further (to rate, skip, etc) that they start pester you to sign up. I don't know how their conversion rates are, but I appreciated being allowed to at least get a brief feel for it before handing over my contact info.

This is why I'll never try feedly.com. What is it? What does it do? Without giving them sign up information, I'll never know.

Would you mind if I shamelessly plugged my creation here?

--SHAMELESS PLUG FOLLOWS--

@updt_me is an RSS reader/Twitter bot that allows you to 'read your feeds' via Twitter DMs. Any and all updates to blogs/feeds you follow are sent to you via twitter DM. There is no signup; just a twitter follow. Because DM.

I am currently using it to follow known infrequent/irregular blogs & feeds like xkcd, smbc, etc.

In case you are still reading this, the bot is [@updt_me](http://twitter.com/updt_me). There's also a basic microsite up at: http://update-me.herokuapp.com

Could you let me know what you think? Thanks, in advance!

This is the reason I started working on Streme (http://streme.co). I just wanted to be able to collaborate on a list of links (for sharing music recommendations with my brother) without needing to register for something and then also without having to convince him to register as well.

I understand the motivation for promiscuous early adopters but what's the motivation for the business?

If your business implement this strategy, you're relinquishing (in exchange of nothing) to the benefit of user retention created by the loss aversion bias and sense of belonging that the "harder" conversion has generated.

Slows development end of story. Since the dawn of the library people liked to be able to browse freely!!! meaning they could pick up and put down knowledge at will. Think to the shitty D&D movie and how the thieves want to sneak into the mages horde of knowledge and what a shitty hitty world that was

Count me as the opposite.

I like sites that have lots of screenshots and emails educating me on how something would work before I have to bother using it.

I have seen a lot of sites that let me "try before I sign up". More often than not, this gets me caught in the weeds of the product and it feels like work and I get turned off.

Totally agree with this article! There are very few instances where a signup is mandatory to "test the waters". At the very least you should be able to observe(not participate) an app/site/whatever without having to give credentials.

Every time I make something new, whether for myself or for work, conversion is the very first though. How can I eliminate text inputs, make less required, or eliminate them all together until the user feels it is worth their time to actually sign up? This is the question everyone creating these sites should ask.

It's incredibly frustrating to make it half way through the hoops on some promising website or app only to be confronted with the "sign up now" to get what you actually came here for in the first place and wasted 30 minutes creating, oh and where's your credit card? You can shove that right up your ass, i'm out, oh and pissed.

How this works is beyond me. I'd rather spend a week, month, year whatever making something better for myself than be bullied into signing up for your crap app.

Yep, I completely agree. We actually did exactly this (just last week) and created a QR for a live demo on our landing page (www.infoduce.com). This way people can see more than just a screenshot before having to "sign up."

http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d0...

It's a hyperlink. Do you use hyperlinks?

Are QR codes on business cards actually easier to use than short URLs on business cards?

Sorry about my earlier terse reply. I was a bit short on time. The reference to the hyperlink was meant to be an analogy to QR codes in general which serve as a transportation vehicle akin to hyperlinks.

Your question in the ease of using QR codes is actually a great question. What many people find is that while it may not be difficult to type a short link, the act of transcribing it from another source is prone to error and mistakes. The value add in regards to technologies such as QR, NFC, bluetooth etc is that it removes human errors.

Don't get me wrong, there are tons of limitations in regards to QR codes as well as other technologies which bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual mediums, but they do serve a specific purpose. At the end of the day, it's really about ROI (very little investment, especially when it comes to QR) and the way they are used.

What can I say, it's a good point.

500px does this nicely by giving you an anon user account on your first visit, and you can use the site in full that way. If you prefer to "sign up" and keep your stuff, it can be done.

The best way to stop making people sign up is to have a universal authentication method that is trusted and used by everyone.

I don't believe we'll see a good one in our lifetime.

But, that would stop an involved sign-up process.

Users are currency in the business of the web, and until putting a 5+ digit number of signups in your deck is ineffective, we'll optimize for the collection of email addresses over engagement.

I hate creating new accounts with passwords, etc but I don't mind "sign in with facebook/google/something most people already have".

And I feel exactly the opposite, because, while I don't use Facebook or stay logged in to a Google account, I do use a password manager.

Very nice article Lee! I think that we need to reimagine the way we catch our users because many people hate to have to register to try a product.

I totally agree. Save to temporary cookies, let me try it. If I want to continue using the product, ask for my email. That's it.

Indeed. Now that a lot of sites allow you to sign up with Facebook, I use my fake Facebook account almost as much as my real one.

Hey, if you don't use our product, At least we can sell your data!

"Stop making me sign up. [...] Discuss this on Hacker News."

Quora.

That's It!

someone should send this to Quora

Reply on news.ycombinator.com