Ask HN: Importance of Easy Sign up? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Importance of Easy Sign up?

3 pointslakeeffect4 comments

So Posterous just got featured on TechCrunch, the easy sell being that you dont have to make an account you can just send an email and have an account. Its an amazing feature that every site should offer.

That being said not every site offers the same service, so of course the requirements for creating an account will vary.

My question is how easy do you make it for people to create an account?

Do you see this as a barrier to getting new signups? How much information are you requesting at sign up?

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I once read that for every question you add to a form you lose 40% of the people viewing it.

Putting it into action- currently working on a web development firm with leads gathered via AdWords, and trying to optimize the deal pipeline. At first there was a "Click to Contact" button that then forwarded to a Wufoo form- just email, website, (optional) phone number, and a comment.

I read that stat, and put up a "Quick Contact" form (also Wufoo- they rock :) ). It just had email, and website, and said "Plug in your email and website and we'll respond with a full proposal for the project." (We only provide one service so it's pretty standardized.). Whereas before we were getting about one lead every other day, we started getting 1.5 a day, an increase of 200%.

We then removed phone number and website from the contact form, since the majority of respondents put that in the actual contact form- immediately, we went from 1.5 to 2 a day. When dealing with leads for development gigs at a couple thousand a pop, that extra .5 helps a lot.

Anecdotal, evidence ahoy, but hopefully that helps some.

Point taken, I guess i am looking more for a formula.

Such as: If total interest in application, x, results in willingness to provide, y, amount of information. This part i understand enough also assuming the constants being what is considered adequate.

I guess the question was more relevant to persistency rates of usage as a result of y, the amount of information they have provided. If you have invested time and value in a system it would be difficult to just drop the system.

Do these easy sign up places allow for the ability to add this information later. Since in most instances this information will make it easier to serve a better product by truly knowing who is the customer.

I see that, yes, horrible signups are a barrier. Asking "normal" questions - name, how did you find us, password hint q/a - is so expected now that, as long as the site works and has what I want, I will do it. I question statements like "... for every question you add to a form you lose 40% of the people viewing it." because they don't take quality of the signup into account.

You get into the question of which is better: quantity or quality? Is it better to have a database of 100,000 people who showed the minimum interest or of 10,000 people who are very interested? I say I'd rather be in charge of those 10,000 but I know there are many in favor of the 100,000.

horrible name

posterior

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