Art Imitates Life

Deb Brown at Aligned Structures offers a nice review of a UIE seminar given by Joshua Porter titled “Designing for Sign-up.” I’ve seen Porter speak once before, and he breaks seemingly complex concepts and processes down to simple, core ideas.

Deb writes:

Here’s the recap (before I get into all the details – good blog form) of the points to help you add this to your arsenal of blog techniques:

1. For visitors who are ready to sign-up right away stay out of their way by providing sign-up options clearly at the top of your blog page. With your logo at the top and a tagline or elevator pitch associated with it that may be all they need to convince them that signing up is a good idea.

2. For visitors who need a little extra to understand what they will get out of it if they sign-up, provide them with a few short bullet points about what their action will get them (notifications) and your blog’s value proposition – what are you going to give your readers?

The bottom line in most cases is that sign-up for your blog feed, your ezine, whatever, is not as much about how easy the process is (that’s important, but not all of it), but about addressing users fears, questions, issues about WHY on earth do I want to sign-up.

There were three levels of engagement that Joshua identified about what’s in the users head:

Level 1 – I know I want to sign up.
Level 2 – I want to make sure this is for me.
Level 3 – I’m skeptical.

Visit Aligned Structures for the entire review.