The importance of a sign-up (or) login page is often underestimated. A recent survey indicates that having the text ‘Sign up‘ instead of Register increases the conversion by over 20% ! – isn’t that amazing?

• The old ways of signing-up are slowly getting deprecated, users want to try the product before they sign-up. Instead of Sign-up -> Try the product, users want to follow ‘Try the product -> like it? -> signup‘
• I already have to remember so many e-mail/password combinations, don’t want one more! – this might also be an apprehension amongst a lot of users. Fear not, for the introduction of openId, Facebook/twitter connect, etc. has made life simpler to so many people – the user can use the same credentials to login. Infact the popularity of these services is rising so much, that a few companies are making money by providing a way just to plug this to your site
• Some websites totally eliminate the concept of sign-up! Kudos – collect user data only if you need it. For eg: redbus doesn’t have a register/signup form – you possibly can’t do anything but book tickets
• Ok, you are hell bent on having a sign-up form – please don’t ask for my birthdate, gender (unless you are a dating site ofcourse!), my sister’s name, etc. Keep it simple with just 3 things – e-mail, password, confirm password
• Geeky world: Most of the designers/coders live in a geeky world! When the form contains e-mail, password – a lot of users think you want the password of their e-mail address! It’s quirky, yes! but come out of the geeky world, a lot of them are like that! You could consider renaming it as New password
• Activation e-mail: This is a common practice among a lot of websites where they send an e-mail to confirm whether you are really *you*. The user needs to come back to his mail account, click on that long lousy activation link, and then login again! (few websites provide your *password* also in the activation mail – atrocious!) This is an unnecessary hop – what you could do, is to set a cookie for 24 hours and log him in for that session.

The bottom-line being to make users use your product with minimum hassles. If your product sucks, it’s a different problem, but atleast let people use it Like most of my earlier posts, I have made all the mistakes above, but wait till the end of this month – we are reincarnating