Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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.

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.

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