Streamlining Twine 1 user registration

N e w U s e r R e g is t r a t io n

March 26, 2009

James Park

N e w U s e r R e g is tr a tio n Current Registration Flow Our current registration flow happens over five pages, which is a bit excessive. Drop-off occurs at every page. Here is a breakdown.

Logged out home page

Join Twine

Sign Up

Profile

First Name Last Name Email Username Password Confirm Password Captcha

Picture Location About Me List your interests

Right now I’ m interested in

Sig n Up

http://www.twine.com

Invite Others

More

Email Gmail Yahoo

Ne xt Step

Bookmarklet

Address

No Tha nks

Add

Send Invite

Add to Twine Don e!

http://www.twine.com/join

http://www.twine.com/join/profile

http://www.twine.com/join/invite

http://www.twine.com/join/welcome

Twine.com asks for first name, last name, email, a username.

Professional business sites use real name.

Sites that don’ t mind anonymity use usernames.

Both sites use email as a way to uniquely identify members and have a means of communication with the member.

Right now we are asking the anonymous user to fill in seven fields.

We can reduce the number of fields in a few ways: 1. Combine “First Name” and “Last Name” into “Full Name.”

2. Either do just “Full Name” or “Username.”

3. Rather than “Confirm Password,” email the registering user their password so they have it on record, in case of any typos.

Even though this page can be skipped, it looks like more registering to have to do when the user thought they were done on the previous page.

The only field here that actually affects the user’ s logged in experience is the “About Me” field.

Entering tags into this field affects what twines the user’ s interest feed displays.

Now we ask the user to invite their contacts to Twine. This is before the user may even know if the service is worth inviting their contacts to join. Also Twine’ s Connections feature isn’ t very robust so there’ s not a lot of benefit for the user nor their connections.

We ask the user to install the “Add To Twine” feature to their browser’ s bookmark bar.

N e w U s e r R e g is tr a tio n Proposed Registration Flow Twine is trying to get users to register and use the site as much as possible. We can reduce drop-off by reducing steps.

Sign Up

Logged out home page

Logged in home page

What are your interests?

My Interest Feed

Technology

Lifestyle

World & Business

Entertainment

Science

Sports

Gaming

Offbeat

Welcome to Twine! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

Username Email Password Captcha Sign Up!

Join Twine

My Twines Tech Twine 1 Tech Twine 2 Sports Twine 1 Sports Twine 2 Offbeat Twine 1 Offbeat Twine 2 Offbeat Twine 3

http://www.twine.com

http://www.twine.com/join

http://www.twine.com/home

Rather than making a user enter tags into the “Profile Page,” let’ s ask the user up front what their interests are.

This also serves to educate the user that Twine supports many interests which they can either choose now or later.

We should tailor the interests to what Twine is strongest in.

Semantic Technology and Social Media, for instance.

This also helps to set us up for affinity registration programs. If Twine makes a deal with people registering from HP, we can choose HP-related twines such as “HP-events” and “HP-announcements” with their own splash page or send them directly to the “Sign Up” screen.

This module can work as a standalone splash page or as a module in a logged out reader page.

Ask for the bare minimum of information necessary to create an account.

These fields could also be integrated into the Logged out home page.

The user is now instantly in their home view and ready to use Twine.

From this page we can ask the user to invite people to Twine, fill out their profile information, and install the bookmarklet. After using the site for awhile, the user will “get” it and will want to personalize the site for their use.