Persuasive signup

Signup forms are always a pain in the arse. For a long time, the volume of email addresses captured (as if they could get away) has been a pointless little metric. It allows brand managers to own something – “so we can write to them in the future”. But with open rates and click-throughs so terribly low for emails and the cost of sending bulk emails so high (remember when sending emails was free?!), we’ve seen implementations of single sign-on more and more common.

I came across a page on lifeblob.com via search results which required me to log in to view the content.

It’s a little annoying that it asks me to sign in to see content that is displayed in search results, but ignore that for a second. What I like here is the hierarchy of the three services, placing lifeblob’s own below the rest. The reason for this will become clear.

This then ties up my lifeblob account with my Facebook account. At this point though, I haven’t been told if this has been announced on my Facebook timeline or if I’ve suddenly become friends with or a fan of Lifeblob on Facebook.

Then, when I try and take a look around Lifeblob I get this. Which seems a little distracting but not a problem.

Then I’m asked if they can contact me using the email address which I don’t actually use anyway (I’m totally unable to change it with Facebook for some reason). Next I get this.

Which clearly I’m not cool about. Then I’m asked if I want to share this link.

It then pulled in all my pictures from Facebook. Which is exactly why their own sign-on link is below Google and Facebook in the hierarchy I mentioned earlier.

Then I got the usual pull-in-all-your-friends-from-somewhere-else stuff.

The thing I like most here is the label to proceed “Thanks, I’ll proceed without friends”. It might as well read “Die alone” or “Forever I shall live with the great darkness of solitude”.

And the misery grows.

The service isn’t great but it was impressive how they conduct the user’s attention so well. You think there’s going to be very little to do, but at every point there is a little more that compels you to either add friends or tell your friends. It even lies to you a few times about where you are in the process “One last thing!”, “1 of 3″ etc.

And looking at their stats, it looks like it might be working. Their traffic isn’t massive at the moment but it’s showing a nice uphill movement and has more than doubled traffic in a year.

If you’re even remotely interested in this kind of persuasive approach to design, check out the presentations below by Joshua Porter and Stephen Anderson.