

Ask HN: Importance of Easy Sign up? - lakeeffect

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.<p>That being said not every site offers the same service, so of course the requirements for creating an account will vary.<p>My question is how easy do you make it for people to create an account?<p>Do you see this as a barrier to getting new signups?  How much information are you requesting at sign up?
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colinplamondon
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.

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lakeeffect
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.

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sosueme
horrible name

posterior

