Web 2.0 Expo: Motivate People To Sign Up For Your Web App
Last Wednesday I attended the Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center in NYC where attendees from around the world gathered to discuss the future of the Web as a platform for business.
Web 2.0 Expo is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. Web 2.0 Expo features the most innovative and successful Internet industry figures and companies providing attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web 2.0 world to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.
The conference offered seven diverse tracks to satisfy everybody’s needs and interests. My focus were the Design & UX, Technology & Tools, Media & Marketing tracks.
One of my favorite sessions was Design for Sign-up, led by Joshua Porter, author of Designing for the Social Web.
Getting people to sign-up to use your online product or service is one of the most challenging things to convince your users to do. Most companies focus on the usability of their sign-up forms thinking that if we make our forms friendly and easy to understand, people will sign-up. Although the usability of the sign-up form is important, it only caters to one type of user: the one ready to sign up. Most users that come to our sites are what Joshua calls Interested but Unsure, Fact-finders, & Skeptical.
We need to design our sign-up page for all of these users. Joshua offered three strategies to accomplish that:
1. Instant Engagement
You need to engage the user as soon as they come to your website. Below are some websites that are using the instant engagement concept really well. All of these sites let their users start using the application without signing up and leverage the ownership concept by prompting them to “register now to save your pageâ€.
2. Describe the benefits & features in depth
Here is your chance to engage the Unsure, Fact-finders, & Skeptical visitors and motivate them to learn more about your service, which will convince them to sign-up. Here are some website examples that do this really well:
- Netflix – offer great levels of description, use “Your†a lot in their descriptions, use graphics really well to explain how the service works in 4 panes.
- Tripit.com – use imagery really well to explain to users how their service works, offer a “learn more” button for people who want to find out more detailed information. They also offer to create your account for you if you just forward your travel confirmation to their email address.
- Billmyclients.com – This website was used as an example of what NOT to do. It has a lot of problems with call to action
- Blinksale.com – This website is a competitor of Billmyclients.com (see above) that has a better interface to explain their service.
3. Leverage Social Influence
Let your customers sell your product and service. By reading testimonials from real people that used your product, users maybe influenced to try it.
Here are some examples of websites that leverage social influence:
- Basecamp – after reading 90 testimonials, it is hard to come away with a negative feeling.
- Jaiku – Show messages from real people on a map as they come in…this provides a sense of community.
Freshbooks.com is an example of a website that marries all of these three ideas together. They have clear descriptions of what the service is, let you know who the people are that use their service: putting labels under photos, provide a breakdown of the users by industry & location and provide testimonials.
For more details on this subject, also check out a free chapter of Joshua’s book Designing for the Social web
Overall, I had a positive experience at the Web 2.0 expo. I attended many sessions, met some interesting people, learned about new businesses that are developing and how people leverage Web 2.0 technologies.
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