

Lessons Learned For Startup User Signups - richesh
http://blog.lessmeeting.com/2011/06/lessons-learned-for-startup-user.html

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nicw
I'm interested in knowing _how_ they came to these conclusion? Focus groups?
User testing? They mention Google Analytics but that won't tell you that users
are overwhelmed by the amount of text on your page.

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BrettJCooper
We arrived at these solutions by doing a detailed analysis of every page to
try an understand what barriers were on those pages. We did 4 detailed tests
on usertesting.com to understand what fresh eyes were seeing with our signup
process. We also informally brought in a few of our friends to give us their
impressions/opinion on the changes. Once we had our approach solidified, we
internally iterated through a few sets of screens before we got to the current
versions. Once we have more data on those screens we will iterate some more.

We did not do focus groups, my experience is that focus groups can be hit or
miss; They are also not really on the agenda for a lean startup.

I am sure that over the next few months we will continue to tweak our pages to
help further tune our conversion ratios. -Brett

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wmwong
I love these real scenario articles. It would be interesting to know if this
panned out for them. Solutions were provided but I wasn't sure whether they
worked.

With the 30 day free trial, I noticed they didn't ask for a credit card. It
would definitely help with sign up, but does it help with conversions? Anyone
have any experience with that?

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BrettJCooper
From a success standpoint, we have had the changes in place for about 2 weeks
and our signup rate (conversions), is up ~120% Although 2 weeks of data is not
enough to draw a final percentage of improvement, we can definitely see the
changes working.

We made all of the mentioned changes at the same time, so we can’t single out
the effectiveness of the individual changes, just the cumulative effectiveness
of our changes.

On your point about the credit card, we intentionally did that to reduce the
number of actions the user would have to do to complete the signup. Also:
Negative billing techniques requiring cc to take a free trial are being
disallowed by a lot of the merchant providers; As a startup we want to have as
good of a relationship with your merchant provider as possible. -Brett

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jvandenbroeck
Common knowledge but I like it :)

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casemorton
A good sign-up form should follow good design, clean & simple!

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dreamdu5t
Why is this only for startups? This applies to anyone online.

