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Ask HN: Registration forms: ask more up front, or as a 2nd step?

3 points by nathanburke ↗ HN
Thanks in advance for reading this.

I'm conflicted and want to hear what you guys think. We're a startup that just went into private beta. Until now, we've been manually approving new users and want to switch to a more automated process. We want to make sure that the people approved for our free product are qualified leads for the paid version which is coming soon. Since we spend so much time and energy getting folks to the website, I want to make sure we're doing the best we can to get them to actually sign up and use the product, but like I said, we want them to be qualified.

So, right now we have a 2-step registration process. You just fill in your name and email, then click submit. You're then redirected to a second form asking for more information. The more they fill in, the better we can qualify them. The problem: people don't fill it out.

The second approach would be to ask everything up front. I'm just afraid this will make even more people go away without even filling in anything.

So, what do you think? Make them fill out everything up front, or do a small ask then an additional one?

Thanks!

6 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] thread
oweng
Small ask, get them using your software/service, then start a dialogue with one of your pre-sales... "Hey, great to hear that you signed up for the trial, how's it going, what are you using it for, who is your CFO by the way?"

It kind of depends on your service though, and who will be using it. Tech types are more wary of long forms and prefer to be contacted by a tech person; opposite for biz types who have a problem to solve and a boss leaning on them.

nathanburke
Thanks, oweng. The target user is a sysadmin or IT manager, and I think that they probably would be wary of a long initial form.
jacquesm
I'm all for asking as little as possible to get people in the door, as soon as functionality requires it ask the missing bits. Like that you lower the barrier to entry, and you give people a clear reason why you need the extra info.
yannis
Absolutely, I hate long forms and I even hate multi-step forms. Ask yourself do you really need that info? Best strategy is to have an e-mail user name only registration. Once the user starts using the system you can ask them to fill in a bit more details (much better than actually spamming them with an e-mail).
brk
A different approach would be Option C...

Get the basic/minimum info to start, skip the 2nd step.

After some period of time/use, ask them to provide more detailed info. You would, IMO, gather some interesting stats from seeing how many people value the product enough to give you an extra 5 minutes of their time and a dozen or so form fields. My guess would be that anyone using the free version regularly and deriving some value from it would fill out the additional form data.

showerst
Why not just A/B test it? Many tools (like google optimizer) allow you to randomly try both, and then evaluate 1) Your conversion (sign-up) rate with each approach, and 2) How many non-valuable users each approach lets through. (This may take some extra work, just make sure you're saving the entrance route in your database).

It may take a while to get a decent sample size, but at least you'll have an answer that's backed by data.