The importance of a well designed sign up process is huge, if your website does not make it easy visitors will not register. Don’t ask for unnecessary information, make the from short, you can always encourage users to give you more details once they are already using your website.

"Your website should also avoid long instructions…"

Placing a link to your privacy policy makes people feel safer, make it visible during the whole process. Your website should also avoid long instructions, users will never read them and if you need them anyways that means that your sign up process is too complicated.

Shutterstock, an online image bank, got a not so user-friendly sign up process design for photographers (is not the same as the one for buying pictures). They require to fill a long form, but the worst thing is that they require to scan and upload a passport.

From the usability point of view this could not be worst. They required the scan after you fill the first long form. What happens if you don’t have a scanner close to you? I can imagine a lot of angry users. Plus, this is a very old fashioned way of identity validation, many users would be concern about their privacy. Even worse (if possible) they ask for a passport that matches your name and address, so I could never sign up to this service because I live in Germany but I am not German and I don’t have a German passport (and the address is not on my passport anyways).

Once again, usability has a direct economical impact. I wonder if this bad design is the reason Shutterstock has been loosing traffic in the last months (according to Alexa.com).