David Cummings on Startups

Account Sign-up Page Best Practices

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David Cummings

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A few weeks ago I was helping an entrepreneur who was getting ready to launch a new site. He took me through the product functionality, the website, launch strategy, etc. When we reached the account sign-up page it was a disaster. An interactive agency had designed it, and it looked aesthetically pleasing, but it wasn’t designed for reducing friction in creating an account.

Here are some simple best practices for account sign-up pages, which in many ways should be treated like landing pages:

  • Remove all unnecessary links, which are usually 90% of the ones of the page.
  • Minimize the header and text as much as possible. Then, cut it down even further.
  • Reduce the number of fields, especially required fields, to the bare minimum. Once you have someone’s email address you can always market to them later to fill out more fields.
  • Keep all the fields in the form above the fold so that the user doesn’t have to scroll down at all. Test and enforce this on monitors with a 1024×768 resolution.
  • State clearly that you value the person’s privacy and won’t sell or share their information.

With these best practices in place, conversions typically increase 10%-50% over a normal sign-up page.

What else? What are some other best practices for designing an account sign-up page?

Comments

4 responses to “Account Sign-up Page Best Practices”

  1. Adam Blitzer Avatar
    Adam Blitzer

    My number one tip is to avoid using Captchas. They are great for preventing spam but unfortunately humans find them incredibly annoying. If people fail once or twice they often give up.

    If you have the tech resources (very easy project), you can use the “honey pot” approach to prevent form spam and not annoy your users:
    http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html

    Reply
  2. Dave Williams Avatar
    Dave Williams

    Should the payment info be collected as a step 2, so as not to reduce registration fiction? Or, should this all be on the same form? Curious about your thoughts? Thanks!

    Reply
    1. Adam Blitzer Avatar
      Adam Blitzer

      Good question. I think it depends on how much other information you have to get (the less the better).

      If I had to get payment info as part of it, I’d ask for it as a second step. That way the visitor is a bit invested by the time they get there. I would set expectations about how many steps the process is though — a progress map/bar tends to work well.

      You can then measure drop off using any off-the-shelf analytics tool.

      Reply
  3. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    My recommendation is to make sure that somewhere on the form page itself that the user is reminded of the value they will receive for registering or giving up their information.

    Reply

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