Thoughts on sign-up & membership
February 13th, 2008 | robots + kittens
One of the most important aspects of SMITH is how low the barrier to signup is. I felt that it was critical not to cruft up the signup process with unnecessary info.
Usually, all the department heads get together and have a meeting about the signup process, and it turns into a brainstorming session about how best to pimp out your prospective user. Ironically, this process is made all the easier since, most times, you don’t have any users yet, and abstract constructs receive this kind of abuse quite well.
Signup is a very delicate time. You are trying to cajole passers-by into entering your little world. They don’t know your world or fully understand its benefits. The best way to show them is to let them in as quickly and as easily as possible.
We also make a grave mistake in our terms. This new person is not a “member.” Filling out a form doesn’t make you a member of a community. Your actions and contributions make you a member. So, maybe we call this person a rookie. And rookies need to be handled carefully and watched. Most good communities integrate concepts of user-levels, where more experienced members are granted more access and control. This is completely appropriate if your goal is to build a vibrant community.
These experienced members dominate your community and should be the ones you focus your attentions on. They are the ones you want to know about. Not the rookies. They haven’t proven themselves yet, and might not even stay around for very long.
As SMITH grows, we have plans to build out the profiles & community spaces, so we can integrate newsletters, geographic functions, etc. But that’s all stuff that will benefit our active members, not the rookies, so we took it out of the sign-up process. Adding extra fields for marketing would only muddy our core message (“share your story with us”).
If it doesn’t apply to the core selling proposition, then it doesn’t belong in the sign-up. There’s lots of ways to hint, prod, remind people to fill in their profiles as they continue to return to your site. And frankly, it’s going to take some time for new members to really understand the benefits that additional information might provide.
So we are taking it slow, and I think the approach is really working well. Our sign-ups have really exploded since we launched the new site.