Make a Better Registration Process

Enhancing the User Experience through better Registration pathways

Improving the registration process on a Web site has many obvious benefits.  If you require people to register, there must be some benefits to both the user and to you as the site owner, so increasing the number of completed registrations is most likely a primary goal of the site.

Almost any Web site that has a user registration/signup process can benefit from a few simple changes that are not that difficult to implement, yet surprisingly few sites are using them consistently.  Obviously, there are many more aspects to creating a great registration process, but here's 3 things that will automatically improve your signup experience:

1. Instead of a User Name, use E-mail addresses.  The purpose of creating a user name is to allow a unique identifier to aid in retrieving passwords, signing in and when referencing a user on a Web site.  The issue is that E-mail addresses are already a unique identifier, so why not use them, and let people use whatever name they want as their "profile name" on the site.  Facebook is a good example of this.  There could be thousands of John Smiths (and well there might be), so why force all the others to have names like Johnsmith1234? 

2. Give real-time form validation instead of making people submit the form first. Personally, I get frustrated enough to leave a registration process altogether if the form fails more than a few times, even if it's my fault.  Why not just validate if the form was filled out correctly as soon as the user is done typing in it?  Stick a check box or a "green means go" icon next to each field that is correct and put a red "x" next to the ones that are incorrect.  This will decrease your visitors' frustration and save a lot of time.

3. A Registration Process is disruptive enough to the user experience -- take the user back to where they were before they started registering.  This is something that is often forgotten, because so much design and development time is put into simply making the registration process itself work well and have a good flow.  You can often forget that the user was most likely doing something on your Web site BEFORE they started the registration process, and possibly something that involved purchasing, donating, or some other type of desirable action.  So when the registration process ends, ask them if they'd like to go back to the last page they were on.

There are plenty of other improvements to be made in the typical registration process.  What are some others that you've addressed recently?