Good website signup practice

With so many websites competing to attract users – to sign up for their products/services – it becomes increasingly important to make sure the website’s sign-up process is easy and obvious to use, and appeals to the prospective user. A technique used by designers (and An Event Apart designers) is to remove the ‘technical face’ from the sign-up process. Users feel more at ease with site and this builds trust with its owners.

Specific elements about this design I like include:

• “Join the mailing list!” – no machine-generated words like ‘subscribe’
• “Don’t” – avoiding words like ‘Do not’ – casual and human language
• “required” – avoiding the commonly used asterisk ‘*’ minimising user confusion. Making it readable also helps with screen readers too
• Email address box that spans the entire page – making it obvious where the email address is entered
• “Pretty HTML” – understandable words for non-tech users (not everyone understands what HTML means)
• “We swear on a stack of W3C specifications” – using humour to soften the important stuff and not scaring subscribers off.

Tags: aea, best practice, Design, forms