Hurdles at the entrance to a site

It's not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance. Someone walking in the door might have to clear some or all of these hurdles before they can even try out the site:

1. Figure out what the service does, and whether it meets their needs. This can be a lot harder than it sounds. The site might describe itself in text, images, or Flash demos. Even assuming the user has Flash installed, sitting through a demo can be tedious. The worst case: the site already assumes visitors know what it does.
2. Find the entry point for signing up. You'd think this would always be obvious, but on some sites it's not.
3. Pick a user ID. Often the first thing the service wants a new customer to do is pick an identifier such as a user name with which to identify themselves to the site later. If the site doesn't use email addresses as IDs, the user generally picks some variation on their own name. If they have a common name, they might have to guess several times before they find a variation of their name that hasn't already been picked as an ID.
4. Enter their email address. If the user ID isn't an email address, the user almost always has to enter their email address separately. Even if the service can be used without an email address, the site is eager to obtain this critical piece of marketing data from the user.
5. Pick a password.
6. Enter the password again to confirm it.
7. Pick the password several more times to comply with arbitrary security requirements.
8. Write down their password somewhere before they forget the new variation of their usual password that finally made it past the arbitrary security requirements.
9. Enter personal data used to configure the service to their needs.
10. Comply with (or carefully turn down) requests for demographic data for marketing purposes. This may include opting out of requests to be added to email newsletters.
11. Agree to terms of use and other legal agreements.
12. Activate their account. The user might need to switch to a completely different application—their email client—and look for a message from the service. They might have to wait for a period of time for this message to arrive. The length of this time period is unknown: it could be a few seconds, or a few days. When the user finally receives the message, they have to find a link somewhere in it that they need to click on in order to verify that they are, in fact, the proper owner of the email address.
13. Download software. If the service entails client software or browser plug-ins, the user has an additional dozen hurdles to jump through: the browser's save dialog, progress dialog, "Are you sure you want to run this?" dialog, an elevate-to-administrator security dialog, and probably a firewall dialog—not to mention the software's own overly long sequence of setup questions.

And finally, after all this, the person gets to try the actual service—and decide whether it's worth using.

With all these hurdles, it's a small miracle some web-based services end up with any users at all. Each hurdle constitutes an opportunity for the user to leave. The site is effectively asking the user, "Are you sure you want to use us? Are you really sure? How about now? Are you sure you're sure? Hmm?" Some users are going to take one of these opportunities and leave. People are growing increasingly leery of starting down the hurdle-strewn path of a new site. They've been down similar paths so many times that they've concluded the experience won't be worth their time unless they're already confident the site will provide substantial value.

Admission: The signup experience for Cozi Central isn't exactly a disaster in my opinion, but it's clearly old school in this regard, and puts up many of the hurdles listed above. I can't say the demo's great, and our setup experience is, unfortunately, waaaaay too complex (and almost entirely a result of the development framework we selected for building the product). We've got a lot to learn, but there are some great sites to learn from.

Next time: A new school of sites that eases users in with anonymous accounts

Comments

[Kevin Dente]

What kills me is sites that ask you to "confirm" your email address by entering it twice. Even though it's clear text and unobscured (unlike passwords). Mystifying.

[Olga Howard]

I was directed to your blog today. You gave me a great idea: See my post - http://olgahow.com/?p=57

[Jacob Wyke]

Yeah I also hate the double entry of email addresses...but the one thing that really annoys me is two separate fields for the first and last name - just take my whole name and split it if you want to display my first name!

[Jason]

Jacob: There's actually a good reason for that, it's just not the one most programmers fall back on (laziness). In some cultures it's common to use what we'd consider the first and middle names as the first name. To use only the first word can be somewhere between overly-familiar and offensive.

You could always have your regex look for the final space instead of the first (and hope westerners don't use their middle initials/names) but that's also a minor risk. The alternative I've seen on some sites is a space for your displayed name. I tend to prefer first/last boxes because they give me all the information I need unambiguously and involves (almost) the least amount of typing for the user.

Same deal with addresses. It's easy for a form to work for the US and Canada, but for everyone else you basically just need to put up five lines and say "tell me what to put on the envelope". And phone numbers, etc. Too often us programmers can forget about the "world wide" part of the World Wide Web.

[Daelin the Cruel]

I absolutely hate sites that require authentication for stupid things like the ability to post in forums (a very common reason to need yet another username and password). Practically everybody does it, and as a result, I have a password list for 73 different sites that didn't have open accounts available on bugmenot.com. At least one of them sold my address to those Viagra spammers. Those are just for the sites I thought I might come back to. Sometimes, when I come back to a site, I end up creating a brand new username and password, cluttering the site's password database, denying them critical marketing information, and wasting my time simultaneously.

If a service doesn't require that "you really are who you say you are"-ness that occurs when money is involved, it shouldn't even have authentication.
It was one thing back in the days of the bulletin board systems. It's simply out of hand today.

[Mike]

Then there are the times you go through all this and it doesn't work.

I was trying to register with CSAA (an automobile club), but the emailed link to confirm my email resulted in an error. Cutting and pasting resulted in the same error as clicking the link.

Although customer support got back to me, their solution didn't fix the problem. I finally gave up. I couldn't waste any more time on something I had expected to take 5 minutes.

The reason you confirm your email address is that people make typos all the time. With double entry, the system has a chance to catch the typo some of the time. Doesn't work if you cut and paste the typo, however.

[Mike]

Daelin,

How funny that they make you register, supposedly to prevent spam comments, then you end up with spam email. Not good.

[Kylene]

Thanks for writing this.

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