Ben Bleikamp's blog about technology and college

Simplifying Signup Forms

If your website has a signup form, make it simple. Users do not want to spend 5 minutes giving you every detail of their lives. They want to spend 5 seconds giving you an email and a password. You don’t need to use OpenID (I have never bothered making an OpenID account).

I recently spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to login to my Quicken Online account.

The problem is I had a username associated with TurboTax Online and that username was associated with my email account. But the username could only access TurboTax - to access Quicken Online (the money management section) I had to login using my email - not the username. Everytime I tried to get my username for Quicken Online it sent me my TurboTax information - not my Quicken Online information. The problem? I signed up using the same email address, and there was only one “forgot password/username” link on the site. If this sounds confusing, it was.I finally had to search through my email and find out how I initially logged into Quicken Online - turns out they wanted my email as the username. The field was called “Username” not “Email” at the login screen. Go figure.

Stop wasting my time

 Making the process simpler is easy, it just takes a little extra work on the programming end of things. A little more effort on your part makes life a lot simpler for your users - and that’s the goal, right? What good are users if you piss them off all the time?

• When you ask for my zip code, you shouldn’t need me to input my city and state - those can be inferred from my zip code.  Once you know my city, you know my timezone - see where this is going?
• Stop asking me to make up usernames. I would like to use my email as my login name. If you absolutely must have login names because your users want to have awesome names like “h4ck3rduud3,” let me login with my email anyway - make both work.
• Stop telling me how to format my phone number.You should be able to figure out the format by running it through a quick function that puts it into the format you want.
• Require as few fields as possible. Do you really need my URL? Do you absolutely need my last name? If not, don’t require it.
• If I do happen to make a mistake that you can’t fix automatically, do not clear the entire form - save the data, highlight the mistake, and explain exactly how I can fix it.