
Stop making me sign up - fonziguy
https://medium.com/design-startups/3c390ea15d1
======
patio11
"If we use gradual engagement, we will have more, higher quality signups" is a
testable hypothesis. It has been tested, by many companies. I regret that I am
not at liberty to disclose most specific results, but gradual engagement is
_really_ tricky to pull off well, and has often roundly failed compared to the
traditional get-their-email-first signup screen. This is true even at
companies which don't do anything very sophisticated with the email address
once they have it, which is (IMHO) generally a mistake in the sort of markets
I usually work in.

The one product I can talk about: Back in the day, Bingo Card Creator had one-
click guest accounts. Their conversion rate was 2. Not two percent. Two.
_Ever_. They were a cause of a stupendous portion of my support burden. (From
the perspective of most of my users gradual engagement means "The Googles ate
my work and now you have ruined the day of a room full of third graders, you
monster.") The engineering to support them was fiddly, and ripping it out made
the application better. (Despite several attempts to improve them I don't
think I ever had near the UX work invested to make the experience not be
awful. Again, gradual engagement UX is _quite challenging_. In particular, the
handoff between guest accounts and "real" trial accounts is of paramount
importance to my business but is meaningless to customers who have guest
accounts _until they get to school_ , at which point they will often discover,
to their surprise, that failing to make the decision yesterday to give me
their email address now means their cards are totally inaccessible. I never
successfully figured out a way -- copy, design, workflow, etc -- to avoid
having huge numbers of people fail at this use case.)

Discontinuing guest accounts increased signups of "real" accounts and also
sales, if I remember correctly. You can eyeball the signup graph here
[http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-
day](http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/signups-per-day) Apologies in
advance for the unclear axes -- that page hasn't had the underlying code
updated in years, and I didn't even consider "Hey if I run this business for
forever eventually that axis is going to get _crowded_."

~~~
nostromo
I think most of this anti-registration sentiment is coming from places like
Quora which force you to register for no good reason, not sites that have a
valid reason for an account. (I've never heard someone complain about needing
to sign up to use Amazon.)

GlassDoor is particularly obnoxious (as I just found out yesterday). If you
click on this link [http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-
Salaries-E9079.htm](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm)
all data will show. If you click almost any link or simply refresh the page,
it's all hidden, blurred, and you get greeted with an overlay saying you must
sign up.

~~~
callmeed
Issues with Quora aside, I think it's actually coming from people inside the
bubble of startups/design/ux who want to complain without actually testing
things.

I often show my wife sites/apps that might interest her. I've never heard her
complain about creating an account (either with email/pw or facebook). If they
drip-spam her, she'll unsubscribe. She's not a designer or hacker–just a
normal _30-something, slightly-entrepreneurial, facebook-gmail-mac-using wife-
mom_.

~~~
reginaldjcooper
I don't trust websites to not spam me and I don't trust them to not share my
email with other spammers. I would never give my email to some unknown
character. It's not an unreasonable position.

~~~
gabemart
I have many email addresses. Some I use exclusively for things like signups,
messages to which are diverted to particular folder on my mail client. I only
ever dip into that folder to click activation links and password resets.
Getting spam to those addresses has zero negative impact on me. I would have
imagined this behavior is quite common.

~~~
tnorthcutt
I suspect it's not as common as you think. I have many email addresses, and a
couple of my friends (who work in tech) do, but the vast majority of the
people I know only have one (or two, if they have one leftover from school,
etc.).

------
GVIrish
This is a major pet peeve of mine with new web services. A lot of them are
trying so hard to optimize the sign up that you can't even figure out what the
service is and how it works without giving up your contact info.

So instead of giving the user a chance to be sold on what you're selling,
you've just turned them away before they can even learn what your pitch is.
You've killed an opportunity for word of mouth as well.

Maybe the idea is to select for users who are so eager to learn about your
service that they'll give you their email first. Maybe that kind of customer
is worth a lot more money.

But I think many people have marketing fatigue at this point, and are only
going to sign up for things they know they're interested in. I mean, I
wouldn't give my contact info to a store that doesn't even let me into the
door until I fork over some info.

~~~
jessep
I'd like to add a little data to this discussion, from the perspective of
someone with a minimal landing page that makes you sign up.

We ([https://workflowy.com](https://workflowy.com)) built a try-first sign up
flow, and a/b tested it against our current minimal signup page, which is a
lot like those you describe.

Unfortunately, the try-first performed FAR worse. Not only did we get fewer
signups (which we expected). The engagement rate for users who had tried first
was significantly LOWER. Exact same product. Same first time experience. One
group tried before signing up, the other didn't. They liked it less. Isn't
that odd?

From my understanding, other services have experienced this same phenomenon.
Why does this happen? It is hard to explain. It could be some aspect of our
try-first design was flawed. But, my guess is that it's something
psychological about signing up.

I had expected and hoped that the try-first flow would improve word of mouth.
I think many do. But it didn't. So I'd encourage as many people to bring data
to the table as possible. I've found through doing tons of a/b tests that
metrics often don't obey my logic.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Could it be that those who took the time to sign up cared more about the
service in the first place (hence, they were willing to sign up)? In other
words, is a sign up process (even a minimal one) basically a weed-out for
those who are more ambivalent about your offering?

~~~
jessep
That still doesn't explain why, on average, those who sign up in the no-trial
scenerio are more active than those who sign up after trying the product. Of
both groups that sign up, the ones without a chance to try the product were
more active (including all the activity during the trial)

~~~
unclebucknasty
> _" That still doesn't explain why, on average, those who sign up in the no-
> trial scenerio are more active than those who sign up after trying the
> product..."_

Couldn't it though? If people were so convinced that they didn't need a trial,
could it mean they felt themselves to be a better fit for the product. Kind of
like an "I've been waiting for something just like this...don't need to try
it...I know I want it".

Whereas a trial might reflect some ambivalence by definition: "Not so sure.
But, maybe I'll give it a try."

------
lutusp
Quote: "99% of sites/apps/services we visit now make you register and go
through an on-boarding process before getting to the meat of the product."

That's because signing up _is the product_. The touted "product" is a fiction,
a pander to get you to sign up. Another way to say this is _you are the
product_ , the advertised "product" is just bait to lure you in.

If you haven't signed up and the company e-mails you, they're in violation of
the Can-Spam Act. Once you've signed up, you become a customer, a category
excluded from the sanctions of the Can-Spam Act. So getting you to sign up is
not just the most important thing, _it is the only thing_.

I wish people who wrote articles like the linked one actually knew something
-- that might make their articles worth reading.

~~~
codegeek
"So getting you to sign up is not just the most important thing, it is the
only thing."

Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not. If I don't understand
what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign up? If just signing up
makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that still make me want
to _use_ your app ? It doesn't. Just because I am forced to sign up does not
mean I will be a paying customer or an active user. That is what matters not
just a sign-up.

~~~
lutusp
> Wait, what? Why does it matter whether I sign up or not.

It may not matter to you, but it certainly matters to them. If you sign up,
you become a customer.

> If I don't understand what the service/app is for, why would I want to sign
> up?

Try to think like the site operator. They know they don't have anything
interesting to offer you, but you certainly have something interesting to
offer them: your identity.

> If just signing up makes it legal for the company to email me, how does that
> still make me want to use your app?

Who cares? The point is to get you to sign up, reveal your personal
information, not to offer you anything useful for your trouble.

> Just because I am forced to sign up does not mean I will be a paying
> customer or an active user.

You clearly don't understand how the Can-Spam Act works. The Can-Spam Act
doesn't apply to people who are customers, i.e. people who have signed up. So
by signing up, you've given permission to be spammed perpetually.

~~~
ryandrake
Respectfully, I think your view is overly cynical, and applies to a very small
number of services out there that truly provide no value and exist solely for
the purpose of harvesting E-mail addresses and SPAMming.

For most operators with a genuine product, the push to get you to register is
neither 100% for your benefit nor 100% for theirs.

~~~
lutusp
> For most operators with a genuine product ...

Those sites can prove their sincerity by telling you what they offer before
asking for a signup. But that's not the topic under discussion.

------
gfodor
"Stop making testable claims without evidence."

"Stop making absolute claims about things that may only be true sometimes."

"Stop assuming what frustrates you frustrates everyone."

"Stop thinking that other people cannot see 'obvious' design flaws like you
can and didn't think through the tradeoffs involved."

------
yarianluis
This article makes points that sound fine on the surface, but ignore reality.
There's a very good reason why a lot of sites do this and won't stop any time
soon--it works. The article claims some effects to "conversions, usage and how
people feel about your product" but is very light on the details of how it
actually affects those things.

Getting a user to sign up facilitates a whole range of options (promotional
emails being just one of them) that help drive user retention and engagement.
I am not advocating making your product obscure _until_ they sign up. The
value proposition of your product should be clear, regardless of whether
someone signs up or not. But it is not clear that making them signup before
they can actually use it for themselves decreases conversion or usage.

The complaint made here will become ever weaker as "Sign Up with Google" and
other single-sign-on services become more widespread. Signing up in those
cases takes a single click, and my experience is in many cases instantly
personalized with my data from other services. This might make some HN
denizens cringe, but the average person seems to not mind.

~~~
Silhouette
I don't understand why the parent is getting downvoted. It is one of the few
rational, realistic posts so far in this discussion. [Edit: In the time it
took to write this post, a few other people now seem to have expressed similar
views.]

Of course visitors would rather try everything for free indefinitely and never
give anything up in return. That's obvious.

On the other hand, in today's world, web sites are often transient things you
find via social networks and search engines and visit only briefly the first
time. Even if you find a site interesting, if you forget to bookmark it
somewhere obvious or you found it at work but get distracted by the time you
reach home, you might never think to go back. From the site owner's point of
view, if subsequent more deeply engaged visits never happen and they have no
way of re-engaging with genuine prospective customers, they could be losing a
huge proportion of their potential revenues.

There's always a balancing act in these things, trying to demonstrate enough
value to a prospect as easily as possible that they engage, yet not giving
away so much that they have little incentive to engage and don't see enough
extra value to justify becoming a paying customer. Trying to get people to
sign up when they don't even know what you do yet is probably not a good
strategy, but neither is letting them see so much that they wind up just
circulating around your site and never converting.

Ultimately, if being a little more aggressive about getting people to the next
stage of conversion puts some people off, _that 's good_. Those people
probably weren't going to sign up anyway, and all they were doing was wasting
your resources and polluting your data about genuine prospects. It sounds
harsh and unpleasant to say it so bluntly, but it's probably the reality if
you're running a modern commercial site that offers genuine value but isn't an
essential service where visitors are certain to come looking again later.

------
rogerbinns
It can cost real money foregone as the $300 million button article showed
[http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/](http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/)

On the weekend I decided to try some boots from Zappos. They were bought by
Amazon 4 years ago, and have "legendary" customer service. Not in my
experience. You can login with your Amazon account, but then it asks for your
name. Strange. I go to checkout and they want my billing name, street, city,
zip, state, same for shipping, card number, expiry, cvc and who knows what
else. Turns out that they aren't integrated with Amazon in any meaningful way.

I sent them an email about it - maybe I'd missed something. I got some
nonsense explanation about it being for my security. Then they started
spamming me about the abandoned shopping cart. At this point I discovered that
each cs rep has some "humourous" boilerplate about how they are going to help
you, before doing something completely unhelpful. They also don't keep track
of replies (an id in the subject or just looking at the in-reply-to header
would work) so each one starts a new ticket where a different rep doesn't look
at the history and does a completely different unhelpful thing. I've now asked
3 times that they delete my account.

~~~
namlem
Wow that's awful. I do hope amazon is working on it. They're usually pretty
big on interconnectivity between their services.

------
crazygringo
Sometimes, yes. But there are a lot of services where you _do_ need an account
to try it at all -- how are you going to try out Mint, or Duolingo, or Path,
or OkCupid, without creating an account first?

Obviously you can create "dummy accounts", but they often won't actually give
a decent idea of the site's experience (browsing profiles on OkCupid doesn't
give you anywhere near the experience of having people message you), and then
how is the person going to convert their dummy account into a real one later
on, if they never even put in their e-mail or password?

There are certainly plenty of times when sites go overboard in asking too much
of you up-front, but it's not always the case.

~~~
tedsanders
Actually, I think OkCupid would be a good candidate for gradual engagement.
Letting you browse profiles before creating an account could make it easier to
see what sort of people are on the site, what sort of work you'll have to do
to write a profile, and generally set your expectations for what it's like to
have an account there.

~~~
jmtame
For this to work, you'd have to let your users opt-in to making their profiles
public. Nothing stops a search engine crawler at this stage from caching
everything, and most dating site users want their privacy. I don't think this
would work.

~~~
smtddr
Most(not all) search engine crawlers seem to obey robots.txt's "Disallow: /"
in my experience. But beyond that, maybe the preview mode of the site should
be done in a way to make crawlers/webscrapers return worthless results. Like
make the no-sign-up site not work without javascript or constantly request
captchas with annoying frequency. For a dating site, I'd assume no-sign-up
mode shouldn't show any detail about the signed-up people beyond city/state,
age & profile-picture.

~~~
darkstar999
> constantly request captchas with annoying frequency

That's an anti-pattern that would annoy me more than the few minutes it would
take to create an account.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Another potential alternative: local accounts.

I worked on a site that's very privacy-oriented and users were still asking
for accounts. We didn't want to store their information on our servers.
Instead, we use localstorage to keep their settings and a list of things
they've uploaded. They don't even have to sign in, and they still get the same
experience. Try it: [https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh)

It obviously won't work for everyone, but if you just want to offer users a
means to keep track of what they've been doing on your site, consider going
locally.

~~~
r00fus
Have you had any issues with folks who switch browsers or computers not seeing
their localstorage (which doesn't sync/migrate, IIRC)? I suppose highly-
privacy-oriented users would prefer it that way...

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Sorry for the late response - the answer is no. We haven't received any
complaints yet. However, we don't have the greatest of followings, so there
aren't a lot of users to complain to us.

------
spindritf
I don't mind that. What bothers me is not knowing what a service actually
does. Either no summary on their website, or what is much more common -- in
follow-up e-mails.

I sign up for a service, or an invite for a service, or even just for a launch
announcement, and weeks or months later get an e-mail that makes no mention of
what is being touted.

But it's a plague in general. It's very common that Wikipedia has better
descriptions of companies or software projects, even their commercial offering
than the official website.

Try looking up which language some piece of software is written in. Often,
googling it + github and then clicking on the repo breakdown is the easiest
way to find out.

------
btoconnor
This was a major reason for creating my board game web site, BreakBase (
[http://www.breakbase.com](http://www.breakbase.com) ). All I wanted to do was
play a board game against my friend, and not have to worry about all of the
nuances of making an account. Just share a link and play a game. Making an
account is an after-thought, if you like using the service.

edit: hyperlinks, how do they work?

~~~
purplelobster
Just like to say that I love this concept.

------
ig1
Users expect to register. I've seen UX lab studies testing it, without
registration users get _really_ confused and don't understand what's happening
with their data.

Conversion can actually drop heavily with non-registration approaches.

Obviously it depends on the app, one where you only need to use it once you
can and probably should design your UX to not need it. But if your app
actually needs to maintain user state over multiple sessions then creating a
user makes a lot of sense.

(Although you can build up user profile over time rather than requiring it
upfront)

------
olegp
We tried this with the web app launcher at
[https://starthq.com](https://starthq.com). Visitors could create their app
launcher before signing up.

It did not work as expected as users were confused and few completed the
process. Right now we ask for the email up front, but don't demand that the
email is verified by clicking the link we send them. This works much better
and we're seeing more than two thirds of the users coming back after the
initial visit.

------
jneal
I very often turn away from sites that ask me to sign up. It doesn't matter
how interested I am, if you ask me to sign up without allowing me to see what
I came to see, I will go away and forget I ever heard about you.

------
bambax
So true; imgur should be mentioned as a service that offers great value
without asking you to sign up.

I started urgeous.com with the same idea: blogging without signup. It got zero
traction and was/is maybe too complex to use as it is but I still believe in
the idea! ;-)

~~~
kristopolous
Service works. It's pretty nice. Here's some suggestions:

* The <title> tag doesn't get the subject line.

* I want a readable url. I would assume that my test url p34t3aaa44n could be a bit simpler. After all, the whole of YouTube is 11 characters. Something like /p34t3a/Title would be awesome. In base64 with 6 digit ids you still have a namespace of 68.7 billion posts.

* There should be special markup just for your site. Here's an idea, something like:

[theme:moonlight]

Look at the nice darkness.

* I don't use signatures but many do. This will be a hassle for them.

* And finally, choose a different name. As an American at least, "Urgeous" sounds awful. Something more in-tune to what the site is would be great. I spent about 10 seconds doing some whois queries; emailpos.com is closer to what I'd be expecting - and it's available. Smash two words together, drop a vowel; all the cool kids are doing it.

------
austenallred
As a marketer, I see the temptation. Whether you like it or not, the things
that you sign up for are more sticky, regardless of how good the product is.

It takes a leap of faith as a marketer to let you see a product without
getting a way to get you back first. What marketers need to realize is that if
you force people to sign up first they will leave in droves before they have
any idea what you've created.

I think the optimal landing page is "create an account" with a way to bypass
and "see it first."

------
dools
We implemented this with Decal about year ago with an online tour that
requires no signup[1]. We initially had an online tour which not only required
signup but verified your email.

Not only did this mean fewer people would try it out, but it meant we got a
great deal of disposable emails.

Our motivation was obvious: we wanted the free tour to get leads. Each time
someone created an account to test, some resources were consumed so we needed
to make sure we got a "high value" lead with a valid email.

When I watched Kevin Hale's Mixergy interview he talks about the fact that
when they first launched the idea of Wufoo on their blog particletree they
didn't even have a backend. It just demonstrated to people what it was like to
use.

We were inspired by that when creating our own tour and we created a way to
communicate the benefits our product offers for both deployment and end user
interface in a frontend application that requires no signup or account
creation.

Interestingly, not only do we get a better quality of email now, but about 50%
of people who take the tour, put their email address in even though we only
ask for it _at the end_.

[1][http://www.decalcms.com/](http://www.decalcms.com/)

~~~
brentisx
I'm not sure I understand why you would require an email to see a product
tour???? I've reread your post 2x and it is not clear. If this is the case, I
agree - bad idea.

Another thing you can do as incremental is provide dummy data or fixed queries
which give them a taste of the UI but not with their data.

------
mugiltsr
If you are not making sign-up mandatory, you would not be able to validate the
pain point of the problem. People normally would give you their email
address(or even pay through their credit card) if you are solving burning
problem for them. For self funded start-ups, this may not work.

However, this technique discussed in the article may work for consumer start-
ups where you think of making money later and your present problem is to get
millions of users.I assume you have sufficient runway(could be in the form of
venture funding) to follow this approach.

~~~
tchock23
Exactly - if someone won't even register to create an account, there is almost
zero chance they are going to fork over their credit card info at some point
in the future. Asking for registration validates they will take some small
step toward becoming a customer.

------
alexvr
Like nearly everyone else, I _despise_ going through the registration process
on every site I try. But certain applications simply don't work without
registration. Actually, lots of applications don't. I recently started working
on a tiny web app
([http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer](http://alexreidy.me/apps/WhereIsMyComputer))
that lets you find your computer if it's lost or stolen, and by its very
nature it's quite useless if you can't log in to see your device's location
(and it's absurdly revealing if you alternatively display a page with
thousands of names and corresponding coordinates). Since many sites simply
wouldn't work without registration, I propose that we make registration more
painless (maybe get rid of the whole email requirement and instead delete
accounts that don't verify with email if they are clearly spammers or
inactive) or, when a registration-free trial is not viable due to the nature
of the application, we could design sites with a demo feature or demo video.

------
state
Does anyone else find it ironic that there are so many articles bemoaning the
annoyances of web services written on the web service Medium?

~~~
untilHellbanned
good point, but isn't more that the Medium staff, probably all web developers,
is highlighting these types of posts?

I've written about basketball and other subjects and they literally get 0
views.

------
josephlord
I suppose for me there are several categories.

1) If other data or significant user input of any sort is required or possible
get a log in so that progress can be recovered. Shopping is probably an
exception, I don't generally want an account just to buy the thing.

2) If it is a webservice or API or something similar I won't sign up generally
until I have seen a) the pricing b) some documentation and c) had the option
to review the terms of service. Going back to an earlier post today about
improper use of Google's maps API. Don't hide your sales information (and that
includes technical documentation) behind a sign in without a good reason.

3) In some cases I understand the the email address and permission to send me
further marketing is the price of access to some information. I understand
this and if the offer is good enough I may expect although I will probably
decline four out of five times.

------
brentisx
Umm.. you are missing a huge part of the psychology behind incremental buy-in.
Think about it a bit. If someone let you test drive a Ferrari for a year would
you ever be inclined to buy it? Why right. But if you had 20 friends tell you
something is amazing and you should buy it and you will be amazed, chances are
you will be intrigued and much more likely to put your money down. SaaS/cloud
products are much harder to sell IMO than downloadable software too. We used
to use the analogy that if someone is downloading your software we are getting
an invitation into someone's front door to sell them on the product's virtues.
With SaaS, the sales scenario is kin to trying to sell via product display in
a crowded mall. Sensory overload with too many different options to distract
someone's attention.

------
hrvbr
Well, I'm building a dating site as a hobby project. I could add a "Just try
without an account" option but then, there's still a rather long form to fill
to decide who the user should be connected with. Removing only two fields
doesn't seem like a very good idea in this case.

------
jpalomaki
Instead of abandoning the registration, maybe it could be streamlined to make
it easier for the user.

In many cases it would be enough to just ask for user's email address. Giving
just some email address would allow me in to service and I could start using
it. On the background the system would send me the standard welcome message
via email, but that would not require any immediate action from my behalf.

If I decided to become a regular user, I could then setup my password on the
service. Maybe the system could point out in the UI that I'm not yet fully
registered.

In case I forgot the whole thing and tried to use the same email to log on the
service next week, the service would remind me that this email is already in
use and ask me to go through the verification process to setup a password.

------
sspiff
2013 and we still haven't really gotten to a good, universal single-sign on
system.

OpenID seemed like it was going to get us there (at least to me), but nowadays
many sites moved away in favour of Google or Facebook or Twitter specific
logins, often asking for a little more rights than I'm comfortable giving
them.

Still, anything is better than signing up to a site with a username and
password, and receiving a mail with your account info in plain text. Since the
LinkedIn and Twitter hacks, I've lost faith in the backend developers to treat
the storage of account info with the respect they deserve. (at least use a
hash and a unique salt per user...)

~~~
quadrangle
The solution is already here but is still beta: Mozilla Persona (previously
known as browserid)

~~~
sspiff
Interesting, I hadn't seen Persona before (I associated it with their previous
"Firefox Persona" skinning system.

------
mikejarema
Great example of try first, signup later that I coincidentally just discovered
is Litmus' email rendering preview system - [https://litmus.com/email-
testing](https://litmus.com/email-testing)

They go quite far with it, which was really nice for my specific use case,
allowing me to share the results with my team before proceeding with
registration.

Now it begs the question whether or not I'll come back later to signup for the
service, but regardless they've left a fantastic impression on me as a
potential future user.

------
pbreit
I suspect we don't hate signing up as much as the OP posits. I particularly
dislike the shopping sites such as One Kings Lane that required singnup/login
just to browse, but apparently OKL is doing something right since it I believe
it's a "leader".

On the contrary, Stripe's guest access always struck me as very odd, and
unlikely to be copied. For payments, I'd rather go ahead and signup to get my
sandbox account.

------
ryandrake
I think Apple's app review guidelines help somewhat in this regard. They
specifically forbid apps from requiring registration in order to work. I have
had several apps rejected for this reason, and am now careful to always offer
a path into apps that can be taken without signing up for an account.

Of course, they seem to enforce this irregularly, but at least their policy
indicates they seem get it.

~~~
king_magic
My home/lifestyle social networking app for iOS, Let's Go Home
([https://letsgohomeapp.com](https://letsgohomeapp.com)), requires sign up to
work. So do Facebook, Twitter, Path, and dozens of other apps.

------
jurassic
If I recall, Pandora has a relatively gentle onboarding. You can start a new
station without being logged in and it's not until you interact with the site
further (to rate, skip, etc) that they start pester you to sign up. I don't
know how their conversion rates are, but I appreciated being allowed to at
least get a brief feel for it before handing over my contact info.

------
snarfy
This is why I'll never try feedly.com. What is it? What does it do? Without
giving them sign up information, I'll never know.

~~~
DjangoReinhardt
Would you mind if I shamelessly plugged my creation here?

\--SHAMELESS PLUG FOLLOWS--

@updt_me is an RSS reader/Twitter bot that allows you to 'read your feeds' via
Twitter DMs. Any and all updates to blogs/feeds you follow are sent to you via
twitter DM. There is no signup; just a twitter follow. Because DM.

I am currently using it to follow known infrequent/irregular blogs & feeds
like xkcd, smbc, etc.

In case you are still reading this, the bot is
[@updt_me]([http://twitter.com/updt_me](http://twitter.com/updt_me)). There's
also a basic microsite up at: [http://update-me.herokuapp.com](http://update-
me.herokuapp.com)

Could you let me know what you think? Thanks, in advance!

------
voidgmr
This is the reason I started working on Streme
([http://streme.co](http://streme.co)). I just wanted to be able to
collaborate on a list of links (for sharing music recommendations with my
brother) without needing to register for something and then also without
having to convince him to register as well.

------
sebastianconcpt
I understand the motivation for promiscuous early adopters but what's the
motivation for the business?

If your business implement this strategy, you're relinquishing (in exchange of
nothing) to the benefit of user retention created by the loss aversion bias
and sense of belonging that the "harder" conversion has generated.

------
belmontjones
Slows development end of story. Since the dawn of the library people liked to
be able to browse freely!!! meaning they could pick up and put down knowledge
at will. Think to the shitty D&D movie and how the thieves want to sneak into
the mages horde of knowledge and what a shitty hitty world that was

------
tarr11
Count me as the opposite.

I like sites that have lots of screenshots and emails educating me on how
something would work before I have to bother using it.

I have seen a lot of sites that let me "try before I sign up". More often than
not, this gets me caught in the weeds of the product and it feels like work
and I get turned off.

------
bryanp123
Totally agree with this article! There are very few instances where a signup
is mandatory to "test the waters". At the very least you should be able to
observe(not participate) an app/site/whatever without having to give
credentials.

Every time I make something new, whether for myself or for work, conversion is
the very first though. How can I eliminate text inputs, make less required, or
eliminate them all together until the user feels it is worth their time to
actually sign up? This is the question everyone creating these sites should
ask.

It's incredibly frustrating to make it half way through the hoops on some
promising website or app only to be confronted with the "sign up now" to get
what you actually came here for in the first place and wasted 30 minutes
creating, oh and where's your credit card? You can shove that right up your
ass, i'm out, oh and pissed.

How this works is beyond me. I'd rather spend a week, month, year whatever
making something better for myself than be bullied into signing up for your
crap app.

------
xarien
Yep, I completely agree. We actually did exactly this (just last week) and
created a QR for a live demo on our landing page (www.infoduce.com). This way
people can see more than just a screenshot before having to "sign up."

~~~
janjongboom
[http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d0...](http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51641081eab8ead54d000019-852-1136/qr%20code%20flow%20chart.jpg)

~~~
xarien
It's a hyperlink. Do you use hyperlinks?

~~~
anonymoushn
Are QR codes on business cards actually easier to use than short URLs on
business cards?

~~~
xarien
Sorry about my earlier terse reply. I was a bit short on time. The reference
to the hyperlink was meant to be an analogy to QR codes in general which serve
as a transportation vehicle akin to hyperlinks.

Your question in the ease of using QR codes is actually a great question. What
many people find is that while it may not be difficult to type a short link,
the act of transcribing it from another source is prone to error and mistakes.
The value add in regards to technologies such as QR, NFC, bluetooth etc is
that it removes human errors.

Don't get me wrong, there are tons of limitations in regards to QR codes as
well as other technologies which bridge the gap between the physical and the
virtual mediums, but they do serve a specific purpose. At the end of the day,
it's really about ROI (very little investment, especially when it comes to QR)
and the way they are used.

------
shurcooL
What can I say, it's a good point.

500px does this nicely by giving you an anon user account on your first visit,
and you can use the site in full that way. If you prefer to "sign up" and keep
your stuff, it can be done.

------
educating
The best way to stop making people sign up is to have a universal
authentication method _that is trusted and used by everyone_.

I don't believe we'll see a good one in our lifetime.

But, that would stop an involved sign-up process.

------
coreyward
Users are currency in the business of the web, and until putting a 5+ digit
number of signups in your deck is ineffective, we'll optimize for the
collection of email addresses over engagement.

------
lg
I hate creating new accounts with passwords, etc but I don't mind "sign in
with facebook/google/something most people already have".

~~~
jasomill
And I feel exactly the opposite, because, while I don't use Facebook or stay
logged in to a Google account, I do use a password manager.

------
giociferri
Very nice article Lee! I think that we need to reimagine the way we catch our
users because many people hate to have to register to try a product.

------
pjbrunet
I totally agree. Save to temporary cookies, let me try it. If I want to
continue using the product, ask for my email. That's it.

~~~
Simple1234
Indeed. Now that a lot of sites allow you to sign up with Facebook, I use my
fake Facebook account almost as much as my real one.

------
couchdive
Hey, if you don't use our product, At least we can sell your data!

------
hmans
"Stop making me sign up. [...] Discuss this on Hacker News."

------
jknfrsj
Quora.

------
afonsopraca
That's It!

------
chermanowicz
someone should send this to Quora

