Low Bar, High Ceiling - The Posterous Philosophy(sexywidget.com)
sexywidget.com
Low Bar, High Ceiling - The Posterous Philosophy
http://www.sexywidget.com/my_weblog/2009/07/low-bar-high-ceiling-the-posterous-philosophy.html
8 comments
FYI: Your website is improperly categorized by OpenDNS as 'Adult Themes' (probably due to the word 'sexy' in the domain), and therefore blocked for me. I flagged it as improperly categorized. Hopefully it gets resolved soon as I am interested in reading this post.
Thanks for the heads up. For a long time, this blog ranked on the first page of Google in Saudi Arabia for the keyword "sexy." Lots of useless traffic.
Not wanting users to sign up right away and hiding your advanced features sounds like odd/contrary advice. On the low end, wouldn't you want Aunt Suzy to sign up right away (before she gets confused) and geeky Nephew Bill to know how to connect your app to all his favorite social sites (without digging for it)?
The delayed sign up idea seems to be very potent. Rather than having someone dump all of their information into your database right away (which you then have to save, probably for as long as your app is running), you slowly draw the information out of the user, making the registration process as transparent as possible. If (using your example) Aunt Suzy goes through all the work to sign up, then gets confused, not only does she have a bad taste in her mouth when it comes to your app ("Oh, MyBigApp? Yeah, I tried it once, but after I spent 20 minutes signing up I got confused and left"), she also won't be coming back to use that sign up if she got confused. For the most part, there's no reason to have a user registered for something if they're not going to use it.
In regards to connecting apps, I'm really not convinced being able to do that is a good idea (I hate it when people have to post everything they do online to Facebook, or whatever else they use). There are people who like it, so it may be worth having, but it certainly isn't a feature I would encourage using.
In regards to connecting apps, I'm really not convinced being able to do that is a good idea (I hate it when people have to post everything they do online to Facebook, or whatever else they use). There are people who like it, so it may be worth having, but it certainly isn't a feature I would encourage using.
When you are trying out something new, being faced with a page of form fields is often the moment you think to yourself: "well, it's probably cool, but this is a lot of effort".
Making signups 'lazy' and 'gradual' means you never have to climb that wall... you step over the small amounts of work while playing with the app.
Making signups 'lazy' and 'gradual' means you never have to climb that wall... you step over the small amounts of work while playing with the app.