Web Consulting Washington DC » Web Video http://www.webconsultingdc.com It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:22:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Ryan Singer at FOWD on Ten Things to Improve Sign-Up Forms http://www.webconsultingdc.com/2007/ryan-singer-at-fowd-on-ten-things-to-improve-sign-up-forms/ http://www.webconsultingdc.com/2007/ryan-singer-at-fowd-on-ten-things-to-improve-sign-up-forms/#comments Wed, 23 May 2007 18:59:27 +0000 Ernesto Gluecksmann http://www.webconsultingdc.com/2007/ryan-singer-at-fowd-on-ten-things-to-improve-sign-up-forms/ Ryan Singer of 37 Signals gave a talk on ways to improve a sign-up forms for websites. It is a good refresher for web professionals to remember to think about the user experience first and foremost. It’s easy for developers to get into their projects’ technical goals and forget that their users are going to come with varying levels of expertise and experience. Its vitally important to put the user experience first, and “building momentum” as Ryan refers to it, is very important. Your website conversion or your web apps adoption rates depend on it.

I love using the “don’t make me think” rule of thumb, heck, it’s a core principal as far as I’m concerned. Your websites and web apps need to be designed to minimize the amount of “thinking” your users have to do when interacting with them. Especially with sign-up forms, if it’s complicated, if it’s long, if it has ambiguous language, this is going to work against you by increasing the likelihood of a frustrated user experience.

Tips, helpful advice, embedded reminders, are now more easily applied with AJAX technologies than ever before, so there’s even less of an excuse not use them. More on this topic soon.

By the way, yes, apparently the camera man was distracted by Ryan’s stage pacing, so unfortunately some of the presentation slides were not included, sigh… yes, that’s another topic for another day as well.

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