Posts Tagged web
Signup
Posted by bytingme in Uncategorized on May 1st, 2010
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 
A tale of two CSE's
Posted by bytingme in Uncategorized on February 1st, 2009
Me and few of my friends (H, W, T) have been working on this pet project of ours for quite some time. Noticing the snail like pace (well, almost) in our work, we decided we would meet up at my place and code together. However, T had to rush to Bangalore immediately and W couldn’t make it. So it was finally me and H at my place.
If two computer science enthusiasts meet up at a place, with wi-fi and an unlimited internet connection, they reach a state of bliss where everything else ( food, sleep, etc. ) don’t even bother them. The only thing that would probably fill their hunger is a successful run of their code. And pretty much, this was the state yesterday!
H had come to my place around 1730 hrs on Saturday. After removing all the stuff from his armour, which included 2 laptops, 1 320 GB external HDD, 1 headphone and a few other electrical gadgets, we sat down to plan our stuff. We quickly jotted down the things we needed to do that night and the list was pretty huge. Night-out was the 1st word that occurred to both of us after having planned the stuff.
We took our seats, started coding with amarok running in the background. Wow! I din’t want to move from that place . The tasks ranged from UI modifications ( modifying CSS, argh! ) to writing a custom development environment for our project. Some of the tasks that we did yesterday night
- Set up git repository. Learn how to use it
- A development environment that would enable us to follow a standard and should also increase productivity
- Decrease page-load time
- Use image optimizers to reduce the size of the image
- Trim your javascript/CSS files
- Clean up your HTML/PHP files
That was pretty much the major tasks we covered and, I really learnt so much stuff! I would have a detailed explanation about each of the task in a separate post.
It was a totally different kind of feel working on this project. We started coding it from scratch and we had to solve every single problem that came up. We were exposed to new technologies, and we answered a lot of questions.Why this technology ? Where do we incorporate this ? How do we prevent replication of data ? Why a git repository ? and many more. Finally, we were satisfied with whatever we had done and indeed it was a very productive night-out! Its a fuzzy feeling I experienced that is difficult to put it in words.
I would urge the umpteen college buddies who had done their project together in college, but left it incomplete because of various reasons, to re-start them. You really don’t know how much you can gain out of these meetings. It’s real fun combined with great exposure and knowledge gain.
Long live technology! Computer Science is indeed fascinating
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