Ficly's signup page
Often we make as much public as possible on a site so that people can see what they’re getting before they sign up. Closed websites often have difficulty getting signups even with free membership. I’ve seen some attempts to correct this but today I came across the best example so far:
Ficly (designed by Viget) requires you to login before you can see much of anything. That immediately creates two problems commonly faced by member driven sites like this:
- Users find it hard to buy in to a site’s concept if they can’t browse it;
- Users do not like having to fill in a form without good reason.
Ficly’s signup page does an amazing job of addressing these issues:
Offering common login APIs
Multiple ways to login
Pretty much everyone will have at least one login from Google, Yahoo or Facebook (personally I have all 3). This is the way logins should be going – linking accounts together makes signup quicker and saves people having to remember lots of different login details.
Beautifully written blurb
Ficly has personality and this shows it. With a target audience of writers, a beautifully written section on what to expect is a great way of drawing them in.
Screenshots section
Screenshots of all the key pages
I can’t recall seeing this done before and it’s genius. This one is for the visual thinkers. It overcomes the issue of people not being able to understand a concept until they’ve actually seen it. My only issue here is the way it kicks out to Flickr, you don’t want people to be leaving this page so a modal window would be better.
And finally, a list
There’s a reason you see so many blog posts made up entirely of lists: they are extremely scannable and this one continues the great copywriting found elsewhere. It’s hard to misunderstand something this clearly expressed.
This is a fine example of problem-solving, my only complaint is that the red text looks like a link when it isn’t!
I think this is generally very well thought out, but there’s one thing with which I take exception: the sign-ups. Whereas I can quite easily see why having Google/Facebook sign-ups is a good thing, and OpenID is hugely underutilized, personally I think the only reason Yahoo! is in that list is due to the link with Flickr you mention afterwards.
More generally, I personally prefer having separate user accounts on each website I use, so that if one account is compromised the others are still fine. If I use my Google log-in for everything, and it is accessed by a third party, my online security is totally down the pan across the board. However, because my actual strategy is to have a separate password for each website and then use 1Password to keep track of them automatically, the vulnerable point is 1Password, which isn’t available unless you have access to my machine (and also can’t be given away by phishing scams and the like).
I understand the drive for global log-ins but not providing a separate log-in for those who don’t want to connect all the dots in this way seems shortsighted to me.
I agree that they should also offer their own login, yes, well spotted. And OpenID is dying a death I think, even I find it hard to use. There is quite a high proprotion of people that does prefer to share logins though, particularly Facebook people.