I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die… You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form… We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

Best Practices

According to Luke Wroblewski

• When planning a customer’s initial experience for your web service, think about how you can avoid sign-up forms in favor of gradual engagement.
• If you do opt for a gradual engagement solution, ensure that it gives potential customers an understanding of how they can use your service and why they should care.
• If you choose to auto-generate accounts for potential customers, ensure there is a clear way for them to access their account. Chances are that people will either ignore or not see account creation emails, and may be uncertain if they have an account or not.
• Avoid gradual engagement solutions that simply distribute the various input fields in a sign-up form across multiple pages. It’s a good possibility that this will reduce efficiency and not delight anyone.

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