from Hacker News

People hate to register, some follow-up thoughts

by jbogp on 6/23/14, 10:54 AM with 67 comments

• by thisishugo on 6/23/14, 11:45 AM

      [T]he users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for
      something more, they just don't want anything.
  

  This is an important insight, and there's an equally important corollary: many of the things users ask for will be:

  - not what the user wants at all

  - what the user thinks they want, but so poorly described as to be impossible to implement

  - what the user thinks they want, but actually doesn't

  - what the user wants, but also a terrible idea that will make your thing worse for everyone else

  There are ways to get useful feedback from your users, but asking them to tell you what they want is probably the worst one.

• by lukasm on 6/23/14, 11:21 AM

  I kinda miss old days of the web with very few login walls. I never login with my facebook, sometime I do with google.

  To register and try your product I need to see the demo. Period. Please, do not spam me with newsletters and marketing emails.

• by thegeomaster on 6/23/14, 11:32 AM

  I dismissed Quora at first as a scammy/suspicious website after I arrived at a question there via Google and was afterwards required to login in order to see the answers.

  Later I registered and saw that it's a really good website with quality content, but my first impression was not very good, precisely because of the obnoxious login wall.

• by rtkwe on 6/23/14, 12:19 PM

  What's more fun is when you've registered for a site then come back and can't find the tiny 'existing users' link to use the account you just signed up for.

• by adamkittelson on 6/23/14, 4:44 PM

  I'm creating a MUD (text based multiplayer RPG) with Elixir using websockets instead of telnet. After reading the prior blog post I stripped out my account / character creation and converted to random URLs.

  Game data like this starts out as being unimportant to the player when they're just dipping a toe, but as they get more invested it can become very important to them. I'm going to give players the ability to customize their URL to something more memorable / create a password to protect their URL / provide an email address to make it possible to reset a forgotten url or password. Those things will all be doable from within the game and are never mandatory, the player can decide when or if they care enough about their character to protect it.

  As a bonus the account / character creation / login code was some of the worst code in the app so I was happy to delete it.

• by blueskin_ on 6/23/14, 12:02 PM

  People also hate having to use facebook/google/whatever, as then you are essentially charging a fee of their privacy to register.

  I avoid using any site with a third party login on principle.

• by clarry on 6/23/14, 11:41 AM

  the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something more, they just don't want anything

  Or maybe they just give up without trying as they do not expect you to do much for a minority of the users. It's also possible that they give up and leave, becoming non-users.

• by wuliwong on 6/23/14, 4:22 PM

  I think that the generalizations in this article probably aren't true. It is cool to hear actual experience but the assumption that this applies to mine or any other person's side project or startup is a leap.

  Specifically, I find his UX very chaotic and confusing. More people may sign up if it made more sense? I'm also not sure what benefit there is to creating an account? Further, the fact that 30 people gave him the feedback and 30 people made the account is more likely coincidence than anything. Also wait a week or two weeks or more, and the number of account will probably grow well past 30. And I definitely believe that people do not give feedback but actually wish there was some different feature or functionality. Most people just aren't going to take the time to actually send a feedback request.

• by Sami_Lehtinen on 6/23/14, 12:16 PM

  Your post was excellent, I was just considering the same. Creating a real account instead of just using the shared secret. But now it seems it isn't worth of doing. - Thanks! What I hate even more than registering? Sites which can't be properly accessed and evaluated before registering. Hacker News should redirect all non logged in users to this login page from all pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin?whence=news This is site X, we're really cool, register now. Exactly same rule applies to all of those crappy mobile apps. I want to know what it is all about well enough, before installing it, or I won't install it at all.

• by mbrzuzy on 6/23/14, 3:48 PM

  This issue has recently come up for me too.

  Out of approximately 700 registrations (Specific client, specific event), 4 called in asking where to register. The problem was that those 4 users didn't realize you had to scroll past the fold to find the registration form.

  We had to optimize the site (displaying animating indicators) to let that small minority of users know that there is more content past the fold.

  In this situation it's hard to argue when you're dealing with a client that sells million dollar homes, because what if one of those 4 users is a potential buyer.

• by kubiiii on 6/23/14, 11:54 AM

  It's great to hear from you again. When I saw the feature on nospronos, I thought that maybe your authentification strategy was not giving good enough results. Sounds like I was wrong.

  Did you try to know why they wanted a real account in the first place? Was it because they kept loosing their secret URL? If yes, a resend feature via email would have done the trick.

  Anyway kudos for the website, we are having great funs with our (mostly wrong) predictions.

  Did you try to see how close from reality have been your best user?

• by smoyer on 6/23/14, 11:44 AM

  It's great to see decisions that are made via metrics. I've only got one issue with the post:

  "Feature requests have to be normalized by the total number of daily users on the site -> the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something more, they just don't want anything."

  I tend to think the users who don't provide feedback are those who are too lazy and/or don't want anything. Either way you can't listen to someone who's "silent".

• by return0 on 6/23/14, 12:20 PM

  These are valid remarks, but a major factor is the nature of the website. The world cup is hugely popular and will end in a few days. It wouldn't even make sense for most users to sign up for a website that will be used every 4 years. On the other hand, if your site needs users' contribution, and the ability to attribute them to them, registrations are way to go.

• by fridriksson on 6/23/14, 11:43 AM

  "Users came to your site for a reason or a receipe that you did right somehow, so stick to it." Agree. Always be listening to feedback, but balance it with data and your gut-feeling. If you're building something for you as user, listen mostly to your gut. I've learned that the hard way.

• by read on 6/23/14, 12:00 PM

  A silly question: why did you add a login?

  Is it because 30 people typed text like "how do I create an account" and you interpreted it to mean "I want an account"? And even if they did explicitly say they want an account, which force made you interpret that to mean what they said?

  What happened exactly?

• by pbreit on 6/23/14, 4:36 PM

  I don't doubt the OP's findings but would like to see a better comparison. Like one site optimized for registration and the other for secret URLs.

• by petergreen on 6/23/14, 11:51 AM

  people who give you feedback are the "fans", core users, who you're supposed to make the happiest and who'll stick around the longest, - says the old wisdom.

• by Heliosmaster on 6/23/14, 11:40 AM

  ITT: people who did not read the post and are talking only about its title.