In this week I faced the problem of creating a registration procedure for a new service we’re going to release soon.
I tried to wrote down all of the features a professional and web 2.0 compliant registration form must have, then I summarized this features in a list I’m going to share with you hoping you’ll find it useful.
Need to be fast
It’s a crucial point. You need to ask as few informations as possible and let the user complete his profile after his first log-in.
This is because a lot of times I found myself bored by the quantity of fields I need to fill to obtain a username and I don’t want users gave up while registering to my service.
E-mail confirmation
Ask for an e-mail address during the registration procedure and send an acconunt-confirmation e-mail to that address.
Doing this way the user has to put much attention on the data he is putting in your fields and you can also do a little spam prevention ( that will be enforced with the next point ).
Use logic Captcha
I don’t like captcha, I don’t like to have to demonstrate I’m human, in the future I hope we will find a way to recognize bot registrations in a painless way ( there is already something moving in this directon ) but for now the best I found is to use logic captcha like BrainBuster, a Rails plugin that works very well.
Well that’s all for now, I’m now thinking on the best way to implement a payment system…
