Spock sign-up flow demonstrates how to scare users away... (by Jeremy Zawodny) | Hacker News Reader

Spock sign-up flow demonstrates how to scare users away... (by Jeremy Zawodny)

jeremy.zawodny.com

15 pointsjoshwa13 comments

Uh, it's not a button, it's a link. Notice that it's pushed to the bottom and hardly given equal treatment as the actual button.

If you've ever seen many eye tracking studies, you know that items in the location on the page aren't likely to be seen, leading the user to believe (right or wrong) that they either must disclose a password or go away.

Of course they don't give the two options equal treatment. Why should they? All that means is that they don't want you to skip the step. They do provide an option to skip, however.

Maybe you missed it because you wrote the story with a sensationalist conclusion in mind. At least you got to say 'fuck', right?

Why should they? Respect for their potential users.

Implying that I missed because of how I'd written my take on it seems a little odd. You do realize that I wrote it after the fact, right?

Of course you do. But it's more fun to pretend that I don't "get it."

Had I wanted to be sensationalist, I could have done so.

The point is that you must look at the actual numbers - cost of scaring some people away vs. how many new users this brings in, to actually "get it." I've seen this exact technique work extremely well many times before.

Building a successful site is absolutely not about giving users everything they want, how they want it. That line of thinking can be very damaging to your site.

Maybe you are right, but if everybody would be thinking like that, there would be no Linux, only Microsoft.

Some people crave a pure solution. For me, a web site that employs the trick above loses my trust, and I will never really feel comfortable in using it anymore.

I think they do want to trick their users into giving up their email passwords, as do the other pages that employ that method.

I was a bit turned off by the Spock sign up process myself, but for different reasons. First, the invite email was extremely vague - "a new search engine that organizes information around people"? I thought it might be a new human-assisted search site (something which has been in the news a bit lately), but wasn't sure. Second, clicking the invite list brings you to a very basic sign-up page with no information. As I went through the sign-up process, I really wasn't sure what I was actually getting myself into, but since I'm pretty trusting I just went ahead anyway. Once I finally got to the site, I still didn't know what it was, but I recognized that it was some sort of search engine, so I typed in a search for a bookstore I like and got one result - a person who said they liked something or other which happened to use the same word as the bookstore's name. In the end, I really wouldn't have known what was going on at Spock if my friend didn't send me a link to an article about the site which nicely explained what it was. It's actually a pretty interesting idea, and I can see that the site would work better once more people sign up. Still, Spock needs to work on their user experience, especially on their sign up process. (Additionally, although far less important, they need to work on their icon: their little person favicon looks exactly like the calvin klein logo.)

>I can't think of a very polite way to say "no fucking way", so I won't even try. There wasn't a button for that.

How could he miss the "Skip this step" button so clearly pictured??

To me, the problem is not that they are taking my gmail password, but that they show me this tricky "spam your friends" screen before I am even ready to know wtf this new service is!

Regarding the sites getting my Gmail/Yahoo passwords, I don't think any site is really happy doing that. (We at Buxfer also do it, but it's tucked inside the site for users who really want to do it.) If Gmail and Yahoo were to open up even more and provide secure access to the addressbooks, nobody would have to do this stupid scraping anymore.

Thoughts about this:

a) I don't want people to give away my email address anyway b) perhaps it would be possible to create a kind of bookmarklet or browser plugin that would make it easy for people to submit addresses from their address book? For example a "buxfer-invitation-bookmarklet", which people could use to send buxfer invitations to people from their address book?

I would be willing to trade the few users it scares away for the thousands (or tens/hundreds of thousands) that end up signing up as a result of these tools.

Facebook does it that way, too. Everybody does it. I don't like it, though.

Here's a cookie for not getting it ---> (*)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com