Everything about designing a great sign up experience

If you have been designing or planning for an app, you must know that user sign up or registration is one of the most critical part of it. It can make or break your app’s experience. In fact, it’s not just important for the user experience but equally important for the business.

So here are a few tips that will help you make your app easier for your business as well as your customers:

1. When should you ask for the sign up?
2. How important is this for your business?
3. How to ask users for the sign up?
4. Sign in vs Sign up, which one is more important?
5. What sign up process should you follow?
6. How would you measure the success?

1. When should you ask for the sign up?

I receive about a hundred of emails daily from different apps and services. I receive them because I have signed up and created my accounts in those products. I was looking into them and asked myself, “Why did you sign up for these apps?”

I didn’t really had to sign up in most of the apps. I found no such convincing value behind it. I just did it to see how those apps work. A normal user doesn’t do it.

While for some apps sign up will be very necessary but for a lot of apps, it may not be necessary at all. There are 3 types of apps when it comes to the sign up decisions:

Apps that ask for sign up immediately

There are some apps that cannot really do anything for you unless you signup. Gmail, Uber and Facebook are some popular examples. They need your credentials to share the information you want. They need to make sure that they are showing the information to the right person. Netflix is another big example in this case.

Apps that ask for sign up for a final action only

Yes, I am talking about e-commerce sites like Amazon and Etsy. They show you all the products with all the information without asking anything about you. They want to make the shopping experience easy for you and for that they don’t do anything which will distract you from what you are looking for. They show you some suggestions you may be interested in but don’t ask you for your email address untill your cart is ready for checkout.

Apps that ask for sign up for additional features

The one of the most famous example is YouTube. You can search and watch videos and its totally fine. But they ask you to sign up when you want do to some additional things like comment, subscribe and uploading your video.

So based on those three types you can choose when you really need to ask for the sign up? Unless you are an app like Gmail, Netflix or Facebook, I would suggest you to go without a signup process as far as you can.

Takeaways:

• Decide what type of app you are
• Try not to break user experience
• Go as far as you can without asking for sign up to build trust

2. How important is this for your business?

Remember, it’s not just about the users, its about your business as well. As a product leader it’s your responsibility not only to engage your users but also to get the business value from it.

So in last question, we talked about a few apps who are asking for the signups in different scenarios. If these apps change their sign up strategy they will damage the user experience and people will probably run away from their app.

For example, if Amazon stops you from viewing and exploring the list of the items they are selling, I believe most of their users will go to another website to buy the products.

One most important reason you ask for sign up is that you want their email address so you can contact them later. Remember, a user doesn’t want to give you their email address unless they see their own benefit behind this. So educating the users about the benefits will not only help them sign-up but also give you a change to get their email address.

Takeaways:

• Find your business value before prioritizing
• Find the right time for your users to sign up

3. How to ask users for the sign up?

Asking for the sign up without telling them about the benefits can be a biggest mistake. People would like to know why sign up is important for them. Try to minimise the distraction. Show them the content they want immediately. Unless you decide that you have to bring them on-board and get their credit card information so you can charge for what they gonna use, don’t ask for the sign up. Youtube kids is a perfect example of it. They show a small message in the corner without breaking the user flow. And if user really likes the message and understand why is it important, they go for it.

TED app for iPhone is great example of those apps who don’t require a signup immediately. They will not disturb your experience unless you tap “My Talks” section from the navigation.

For those who really need the signup immediately, Uber is your app. They ask your phone number to get started. Phone number is a good choice these days for these kind of services because for them, your phone number is more important than the email address. Using the phone number, your sign up has become much quicker and easier.

Lot of apps like WeChat, Coursera and Uber ask you for the registration right after you open them. If you are into a new business you don’t need to follow these apps because they are very well known. People who have downloaded these apps probably don’t need to think whether should they sign-up or not. But for a new app, you will have to explain it to the user why sign up is the important for them. User on-boarding can play a big role in this area.

Users don’t want to sign up unless they see some value of it.

1. If users have to register before using the app, show them the value in onboarding screens.
2. If users have to register before the checkout, tell them why this is important
3. If you want the users to signup to unlock the additional features tell them what they can do after the signup.

The key is not to break a flow. See how YouTube does this in their left navigation bar in website.

Takeaways:

• Don’t break their ‘happy’ flow
• Show them what they will see if they sign up successfully
• Show them the sign-up only when they see the relevant information
• Don’t assume that user will understand themselves why they should sign up
• Try the alternatives if possible

4. Sign in vs Sign up, which one is more important?

This is very debatable because lot of people in your team will say that sign in should be more important. Why? because they already have an account so they want to sign in easily. But here again, I would suggest a simple thumb rule. If your app is new or a lot of people don’t really know about your app, you should ask for sign up. But if you are a facebook or a Skype you can probably just ask them for the sign in and no one will mind.

But whether you ask for the sign up or the sign in. Do make sure that you are showing the other option in the same screen.

Takeaways:

• Always target the majority to decide which one should be more prominent
• Show the both option in all cases

5. What sign up process should you follow?

There was a time when we had to deal with multi-steps sign up forms. But over the time the process has evolved. These days you just need to click couple of buttons and you account will be created. And if you are using ‘Sign up with facebook’ you will just have to click a button and it will be all set.

On one side where this has become super easy for users to sign up and lot of people will be signing up on your app, it should be a big question for you whether they are really valuable or not. A short signup form might be good for a quick conversion but it will be difficult for you to retain those people.

According to a study of a B2B SaaS app, we found that the more time our customers spent on our website before signup the longer they stayed after the registration.

Some e-commerce websites have found another shortcut for their users which is ‘continue as a guest’. On one side where it is great for a customer to go through a checkout process, on the other side it will be difficult for the website to engage the users for the next time. They won’t be able to send them the promotions offers to that person. They won’t be able to save the delivery address or the payment options. So now we see some websites removing this option and showing the standard signup process. Some websites will just ask for your email address and they will create an account automatically which I think is better than the ‘Continue as a guest’ option.

Takeaways:

• Build confidence
• Don’t make the form very complex
• Ask for most important information at sign-up and you can ask the others next

How would you measure the success?

You can define the funnel based on your marketing strategy. What I have defined is tracking how many people who came to your website vs how many people who signed up successfully. You should also track how many users are successfully going through your signup process. You should track this by checking how many users came to your signup page and how many of them got the “Success” message.

But this is not enough.

I would suggest to track how many of them are staying with you for a longer period of time and what kind of people they are, because retention is everything after the signup. See an example below of how I used to track the sign up conversions.

There are some great analytics tools in the market these days, Some of the popular are Google Analytics, Google Firebase, MixPanel and Facebook Analytics.

Takeaways:

• Always track what users are doing on your app
• Define the conversion rates based on your business goals
• Compare the user retention before and after the sign-up

So I hope this will be useful for you. If it is, please clap as many as you can, so it can be reached to others.

Or if you have any question feel free to post them below and I will be glad to answer.