Sign up forms – keep it simple, really simple
In the autumn we did a big IA project for a client and we wanted & needed to make the point that sign up for news forms should be VERY short.
The marketing data vultures always want a form longer than my leg (I’m 6ft 5″ so that’s long), so we went to a load of the bigger brands and showed them how they do it – they don’t get their users to jump through hoops to sign up they make it REALLY simple and fast to fill in a form, typically just getting the user to leave their email address.
Here’s how Nintendo do it:
The sign up form is really short, the button is descriptive and obvious and the opt ins are opt ins…
and what I really liked about Nintendo was that right next to the fill in form they tell you what you get before you sign up.
Source: http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/index_newsletter.jsp
So next time your marketing data vultures say they want a 40 field form show them how the bigger brand sites do it, and tell them that if they want to increase the number of subscribers they need to reduce the input fields to the absolute minimum.
