
People hate to register, some follow-up thoughts - jbogp
http://nospronos.com/en/blog/people-hate-to-register-follow-up-thoughts
======
thisishugo

        [T]he users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for
        something more, they just don't want anything.
    

This is an important insight, and there's an equally important corollary: many
of the things users ask for will be:

\- not what the user wants at all

\- what the user thinks they want, but so poorly described as to be impossible
to implement

\- what the user thinks they want, but actually doesn't

\- what the user wants, but also a terrible idea that will make your thing
worse for _everyone_ else

There are ways to get useful feedback from your users, but asking them to tell
you what they want is probably the worst one.

~~~
annnnd
This is so true! When trying to make a better UX you should always _observe_
your users, not (just) listen to them.

~~~
alphapapa
This depends entirely on who the users are. If a fellow developer tells you
something, _listen to him!_ If someone who doesn't know what a CPU is tells
you something, try to figure out what he really wants. But even then, if he
tells you something simply doesn't work well for him, don't dismiss it as him
not understanding your vision.

The problem with some projects (e.g. GNOME) is that they consider all feedback
to be equally invalid, and the self-appointed "designers" are always right.
This is the result of the Apple-inspired worship of almighty "design," and is
contrary to the very idea of _personal_ computing empowering people.

~~~
calvins
"Listen to fellow developers" can be very dangerous too. It's how you end up
with programs that have menus nested 4 levels deep and thousands of options
that will only be used by the developer who recommended/implemented it and a
few other people (at huge cost to the other 99% of users).

------
lukasm
I kinda miss old days of the web with very few login walls. I never login with
my facebook, sometime I do with google.

To register and try your product I need to see the demo. Period. Please, do
not spam me with newsletters and marketing emails.

~~~
throw7
I browse without javascript and most sites are crippled this way. I think you
can't post here on hacker news without javascript on.

The worst is hitting a site that's blank. I hit those every now and then.
Instagram is that way.

~~~
tim333
This was posted with javascript off...

------
thegeomaster
I dismissed Quora at first as a scammy/suspicious website after I arrived at a
question there via Google and was afterwards required to login in order to see
the answers.

Later I registered and saw that it's a really good website with quality
content, but my first impression was not very good, precisely because of the
obnoxious login wall.

~~~
criswell
You can add ?share=1 to their question URLS and read all the answers without
logging in. I've used it quite a bit since I don't even enjoy logging into a
site let alone signing up.

~~~
aikah
One shouldnt have to do that at first place.It's just a bad UX decision and
serves little purpose.

People are going to register only if they want to interact with the website.

If I just want to read content,I shouldnt have to register.Stackoverflow made
the right call and today it's infinitetly more popular than Quora will ever
be.

~~~
_delirium
I think Quora really wanted to be a private Q&A site, which imo is a
legitimate choice in the space of possible communities. But then their results
wouldn't get indexed on Google, and my guess is they decided that they needed
organic search to get enough traffic to hit their revenue targets. So they
have this grudgingly-sort-of-open results page so it gets indexed.

~~~
adventured
They don't have revenue targets. Quora is a zero revenue operation, they don't
have a business model.

Quora just raised money at a billion dollar valuation basically. By
comparison, Answers.com, a much larger site by traffic (with a $7+ cpm rate),
was purchased for a mere $127 million, and was struggling to punch above $20
million in annual revenue.

Then you have to ask: what about Quora being worth $3+ billion, so their
investors can get a return? There's no scenario that will ever get them there
in the Q&A space (it'd require ~$300 million in revenue, literally impossible
for them to pull off as is). They have to pivot out of Q&A because they can
never justify their valuation, and they know it. To be worth that much they
need to be a top 50 site in terms of traffic, and they're nowhere near that.

Wikia for example is substantially larger than Quora, and they couldn't even
get close to justifying a multi-billion dollar valuation via advertising. Or
consider Angie's List, worth $700 million, but tracking toward $300 million in
revenue. Quora's investors have a huge problem ahead of them.

------
rtkwe
What's more fun is when you've registered for a site then come back and can't
find the tiny 'existing users' link to use the account you just signed up for.

------
adamkittelson
I'm creating a MUD (text based multiplayer RPG) with Elixir using websockets
instead of telnet. After reading the prior blog post I stripped out my account
/ character creation and converted to random URLs.

Game data like this starts out as being unimportant to the player when they're
just dipping a toe, but as they get more invested it can become very important
to them. I'm going to give players the ability to customize their URL to
something more memorable / create a password to protect their URL / provide an
email address to make it possible to reset a forgotten url or password. Those
things will all be doable from within the game and are never mandatory, the
player can decide when or if they care enough about their character to protect
it.

As a bonus the account / character creation / login code was some of the worst
code in the app so I was happy to delete it.

~~~
nnnnni
A MUD without character creation? That's pretty wild. I'm curious about this
project now...

------
blueskin_
People also hate having to use facebook/google/whatever, as then you are
essentially charging a fee of their privacy to register.

I avoid using any site with a third party login on principle.

~~~
jasonlotito
Just curious, as you are saying two things that seem to conflict.

Do not use any site with third party login, or that use only third party
login?

~~~
blueskin_
I personally avoid any where it's the only option, although sites with other
options that still ask you to link accounts are still massively annoying.

------
clarry
_the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something more, they
just don 't want anything_

Or maybe they just give up without trying as they do not expect you to do much
for a minority of the users. It's also possible that they give up and leave,
becoming non-users.

~~~
jbogp
No they do not become non-users. They are still coming. Hell, the site traffic
has never been so high recently although more than 88% are returning visitors.
They are just satisfied with what they signed up for at the beginning I think.

~~~
Supermighty
How do you know if the people coming this week are the same people who came
last week? Just because overall site traffic is increasing doesn't mean you
have a low churn rate.

~~~
jbogp
They are "returning visitors", that's basic Analytics stuff:
[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1144424?hl=en-
GB](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1144424?hl=en-GB)

------
wuliwong
I think that the generalizations in this article probably aren't true. It is
cool to hear actual experience but the assumption that this applies to mine or
any other person's side project or startup is a leap.

Specifically, I find his UX very chaotic and confusing. More people may sign
up if it made more sense? I'm also not sure what benefit there is to creating
an account? Further, the fact that 30 people gave him the feedback and 30
people made the account is more likely coincidence than anything. Also wait a
week or two weeks or more, and the number of account will probably grow well
past 30. And I definitely believe that people do not give feedback but
actually wish there was some different feature or functionality. Most people
just aren't going to take the time to actually send a feedback request.

~~~
pbreit
You realize you just provided a set of opinions against a set of facts?

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Your post was excellent, I was just considering the same. Creating a real
account instead of just using the shared secret. But now it seems it isn't
worth of doing. - Thanks! What I hate even more than registering? Sites which
can't be properly accessed and evaluated before registering. Hacker News
should redirect all non logged in users to this login page from all pages:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin?whence=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin?whence=news)
This is site X, we're really cool, register now. Exactly same rule applies to
all of those crappy mobile apps. I want to know what it is all about well
enough, before installing it, or I won't install it at all.

------
mbrzuzy
This issue has recently come up for me too.

Out of approximately 700 registrations (Specific client, specific event), 4
called in asking where to register. The problem was that those 4 users didn't
realize you had to scroll past the fold to find the registration form.

We had to optimize the site (displaying animating indicators) to let that
small minority of users know that there is more content past the fold.

In this situation it's hard to argue when you're dealing with a client that
sells million dollar homes, because what if one of those 4 users is a
potential buyer.

------
kubiiii
It's great to hear from you again. When I saw the feature on nospronos, I
thought that maybe your authentification strategy was not giving good enough
results. Sounds like I was wrong.

Did you try to know why they wanted a real account in the first place? Was it
because they kept loosing their secret URL? If yes, a resend feature via email
would have done the trick.

Anyway kudos for the website, we are having great funs with our (mostly wrong)
predictions.

Did you try to see how close from reality have been your best user?

~~~
jbogp
Glad you still enjoy it :)

The best user so far has 38 points and a difference of 42 That is out of the
32 games played :

\- 9 perfect predictions \- 11 correct outcome predictions \- 12 wrong
predictions

which is pretty impressive

~~~
kubiiii
Well I somehow expected a better score for your top user. But many games
scores were totally unexpected. Sorry for England by the way.

~~~
jbogp
I live in England but I'm French. But yes it's a bit sad now here everybody
just lost interest and went back to drinking tea.

~~~
kubiiii
This explains the nospronos name then. Sorry, je comprends vite mais il faut
m'expliquer longtemps :)* Finger crossed for the french squad then.

------
smoyer
It's great to see decisions that are made via metrics. I've only got one issue
with the post:

"Feature requests have to be normalized by the total number of daily users on
the site -> the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something
more, they just don't want anything."

I tend to think the users who don't provide feedback are those who are too
lazy and/or don't want anything. Either way you can't listen to someone who's
"silent".

~~~
jbogp
Yes I agree, my point was that these silent user can be a majority and they
seem like they really enjoy your site too, coming back each day and all. But
in the end, when you introduce a new feature most of them (in my case close to
100% of them) will ignore it and stick to what they first came in for. That's
why I propose to "normalize" by the daily active users...

------
return0
These are valid remarks, but a major factor is the nature of the website. The
world cup is hugely popular and will end in a few days. It wouldn't even make
sense for most users to sign up for a website that will be used every 4 years.
On the other hand, if your site needs users' contribution, and the ability to
attribute them to them, registrations are way to go.

~~~
kubiiii
You would still be able to attribute a contribution to the visitor of the
secret link. What lacks for a longer use is the ability to recover a lost
secret url.

~~~
LunaSea
We would need to invent a system, that would uniquely identify a user say with
a name which we will call "username" and a secret message which we will call
"password".

We could call it something like "basic authentication".

Wait a minute ...

------
fridriksson
"Users came to your site for a reason or a receipe that you did right somehow,
so stick to it." Agree. Always be listening to feedback, but balance it with
data and your gut-feeling. If you're building something for you as user,
listen mostly to your gut. I've learned that the hard way.

------
read
A silly question: why did you add a login?

Is it because 30 people typed text like "how do I create an account" and you
interpreted it to mean "I want an account"? And even if they did explicitly
say they want an account, which force made you interpret that to mean what
they said?

What happened exactly?

~~~
jbogp
No I was absolutely not planning on adding real accounts. But people went
ahead and wrote me emails asking for the feature:

Example: "Good job for a draft website. Personally I'm playing in different
leagues and I'd really appreciate to have an account to avoid multiple input
and multiple links ..."

This is what made me think it was a real need in the community, which was
clearly wrong.

~~~
read
"to avoid multiple input and multiple links"

You could avoid multiple input and multiple links with cookies. That wouldn't
require a login.

Users might not even know what a cookie is, so they don't ask for one and
instead they say the simplest thing that comes to mind: an account. They don't
know what the options are in technology. They barely know what they need, and
they most definitely don't know what they want.

    
    
      People do not know what they want. They barely know what
      they need, but they definitely do not know what they 
      want. They're conditioned by the limited imagination of 
      what is possible.
    
      - Massimo Vignelli

~~~
jbogp
You're right. It's linked to what has been said in the top comment I think
-users think they know what they want but they have no idea.

~~~
alphapapa
That strikes me as arrogance. Henry Ford's famous quote is taken as dogma, and
the almighty designer is worshipped, the one who deigns to figure out what the
clueless user _really_ wants and give it to him. This is especially bad when
the user in question is asking to have something restored which had been
removed in the name of design. Or the same could be said about "developers":
those clueless users will take what we give them, and they'll _like_ it! This
is the mindset that leads to the widely hated redesigns of Facebook, YouTube,
Gmail, Google+ integration, etc. It's almost like a new caste system in the
online world.

~~~
derefr
> This is the mindset that leads to the widely hated redesigns of Facebook,
> YouTube, Gmail, Google+ integration, etc.

Pretty sure all these companies are heavily A/B testing every change they
make, and would immediately abandon any new design if it decreased engagement
or retention even slightly.

These changes are "hated" by a vocal minority who loves to complain about
change to show how much the liked the old version. They don't quit using the
product, though. And if you ask their opinion again even three months later
(which is another thing big companies tend to do), they'll have completely
forgotten what the difference was between the two.

Of course, some people do quit a service after any given change, no matter how
innocuous—they just disappear without saying anything. But changes, even
change for change's sake, also tends to increase signups. So in practice, it's
just a question of whether the positives outweigh the negatives of the change.
And only real usage data can answer that, not customer surveys—and especially
not customer _exit_ surveys.

------
pbreit
I don't doubt the OP's findings but would like to see a better comparison.
Like one site optimized for registration and the other for secret URLs.

~~~
jbogp
I really wish I could provide some A/B testing statistics, I really would. But
in the timeframe of the Worldcup, a relatively small user base and doing this
a side project only this seems a bit challenging. However you make a very good
point.

------
petergreen
people who give you feedback are the "fans", core users, who you're supposed
to make the happiest and who'll stick around the longest, - says the old
wisdom.

------
Heliosmaster
ITT: people who did not read the post and are talking only about its title.

