Even though the gradual engagement meme has been around for a while,
and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping
up like a bad habit. My site, Newsforwhatyoudo.com was one of the
guilty parties. We saw users coming back to the site repeatedly, but
not signing up. The percentage that looked at the signup form and then
bolted was uncomfortably high. It was time to kill the signup form.
This blog post documents how we implemented gradual engagement using
Ruby on Rails and restful authentication.
Even though the gradual engagement meme has been around for a while,
and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping
up like a bad habit. My site, Newsforwhatyoudo.com was one of the
guilty parties. We saw users coming back to the site repeatedly, but
not signing up. The percentage that looked at the signup form and then
bolted was uncomfortably high. It was time to kill the signup form.
This blog post documents how we implemented gradual engagement using
Ruby on Rails and restful authentication.
I actually ran into this recently with http://www.open.collab.net/servlets/TLogin. Why would anyone require a
signup form for downloading open source software. That was so annoying
to me I simply refused to sign up and found another solution.
MySQL.com is also a little annoying in this regard, but at least they
have a link to bypass the signup to get to the actual download.