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!