Sign Up Process Designs Review

Posted on January 8, 2008 by Alexis Brion

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).

Horrible Login Process at 9rules

Posted on January 4, 2008 by Alexis Brion

Login process should be extremely easy as this is they way users will get into the personalized content of your website. Many users get tired and leave if they try to login a few times and they can not get into the website. Specially new users leave and don’t come back.

Avoid unnecessary information or distractions. 9rules, the social content network, tells users that the password will be emailed when the are at the login page. This is confusing as usually sites don’t send emails during the login process.

9rules Login 20080104

Making a mistake introducing the username or password takes users to the signup page. In this particular case, this is really bad as no error message or password recovery link are displayed. If you want to improve usability and your general web design, I would recommend, first to nicely tell the user that there was a mistake, and after that give an easy way to solve the problem (in this example would be a “try again” or “recover login info”)

9rules Signup 20080104

Login Input Box Into the Homepage

Posted on December 21, 2007 by Alexis Brion

It’s good to give users a kick way of login into your website. Make your login input box or link visible, usually users look for it on the top right corner of the website. Like, for example, Photobucket.

Photobucket 20071221

On the other side, a bad design example could be Safari Books Online, an online book database. It’s so annoying to me that they don’t have a login box in the homepage! Instead they have a “Subscribe” link. Tricky, eh?

Safari Books Online 20071221

Today I had to look for the registration email to get the link they sent me to search books. Safari was obviously not thinking in the user but in the potential customer when they designed their homepage. Already registered users have to remember to go to the subdomain search.safaribooksonline.com in order to actually use the service they are paying for.