best practices in online registration
DESCRIPTION
A common objective for a website is to convert an anonymous visitor to an engaged and active registered user. The challenge is to make this process easy for the visitor while still obtaining valuable demographic information that the site can then leverage to personalize the user experience. The good news is there are established best practices in implementing online user registration, and it is possible to easily collect user data without sacrificing conversion rates. This paper shows you how to increase registration conversion rates while collecting more profile data from site visitors.TRANSCRIPT
Best Practices in Online Registration
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Table of Contents
3 The Importance of Registration
4 Know Your Customer
Watch Registration Rates Grow with Social Login . . . . . . .4
Optimize Registration on Mobile Devices . . . . . . . . . . .5
Leverage Progressive Profiling to Increase Conversions . . .6
7 Garbage In, Garbage Out Improving Profile Data Quality
Data Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Email Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
CAPTCHA Spam Prevention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
10 Who Are You?
Lost Login Credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
User Profile Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
12 Registration Infrastructure
Supporting Multiple Social Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Terms of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Database Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Storing Unified Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Passwords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Load Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
16 Conclusion
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A thriving online presence requires the seamless
integration of multiple elements to deliver
an exceptional experience for your site visitor, while also meeting your business
goals. A sophisticated user management platform must support many steps within
the user journey to maximize the site experience. A powerful user management
platform removes hurdles for both end users and business owners, and enables
you to leverage the knowledge and insights gained to deliver the best possible
value to the site audience.
The first critical component of a user management platform is the registration
flow, which acts as the point of entry into your site—where the anonymous visitor
becomes a registered user. This is the moment where site visitors transition into
high-value assets. While online user registration systems can seem deceptively
simple when you consider only the high-level elements (such as form fields, opt-in
boxes, a database of registration records, etc.), there are many opportunities along
the way where things can go wrong. Low conversion rates, users leaving your site
without engaging, and blatantly falsified registration data are obvious symptoms of
a broken registration system.
The cost of building and maintaining the optimal registration system can be high
from a resource perspective, especially if it includes the lost opportunity that
results when your account creation flow is frustrating or leads users to input
false information, like 88% of consumers have admitted to doing. In this paper,
we’ll reveal and discuss key elements of a successful user registration system,
providing direction as you evaluate options to upgrade your existing system.
The Importance of Registration
86% of people have admitted to leaving a site when asked to register with a form
88% admit to providing false and incomplete information .
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Know Your Customer
Know Your Customer Grow Your User Base With a Better Registration Experience
One of the key objectives of any registration system
is to collect information on site visitors, not only to
identify who is coming to your site, but to help you
make informed decisions about the site design and
content. Marketers also find value in user profile
data, which they can use to better understand their
audience, how they’re using the website, what
products they like, their offline interests, and who is
in their social networks.
Watch Registration Rates Grow with Social LoginImproving registration conversion begins with
improving the user experience and reducing
“friction” in your “conversion funnel” by removing
obstacles along the way that can lead your users to
abandon your form and leave the site. Third-party
research reveals that 86% of consumers have left a
site when asked to register with a registration form
and forced to create and remember yet another
username/password combination.
Organizations of all sizes and across industries have
increased their registration rates by up to 50% just
by offering social login as an option at registration.
Social login gives visitors the option of using an
existing account with Facebook, Google, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and other providers to quickly register at
your site. Leveraging an existing account and profile
with these popular identity providers means you
can easily authenticate website visitors, collect the
necessary data to begin building a profile, and let
them more quickly participate in the activities that
originally brought them to your site.
Ideally, your registration solution should support
a mix of social and other identity providers (IDPs)
that’s appropriate for your site and audience. For
example, consider whether you are managing a B2B
or B2C website, or what accounts your users are
TIP 1 77% of consumers want social login as an option to register . Offer it and watch conversion rates grow .
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likely to already have (that make sense in the context
of your site). With a B2B site, leveraging Google Apps,
SalesForce.com, or LinkedIn as providers can give you
more business-focused data for marketing and site
registration use. Once you have launched social login
on your site, review your login counts by provider, and
rank order choices to find the optimal offer for your
audience. Make sure that you have linked the users to
another provider or to a conventional account before
removing the underperforming provider to prevent
account orphaning.
Each website’s audience will adopt social login to
a different degree, so it’s important to consider
offering a traditional username/password
registration for those who still prefer that option.
Offering them side-by-side, with clear descriptive
language, provides the ultimate in choice, flexibility,
and user control.
Optimize Registration on Mobile DevicesMobile and tablet devices represent a rapidly
growing percentage of new and returning users,
who will expect full functionality at your site.
Failing to provide an optimal experience for these
users can result in significant drop-off in visits and
conversions, as users struggle with common hurdles
of a smaller screen: small links, buttons, fields, and
keyboards. Beyond “Fat Finger Syndrome” (and
its related data entry and navigation challenges),
there is also the consideration that mobile browsers
have different set of technical requirements than
their desktop counterparts. Ensuring that the user
experience on a mobile device meets your users’
expectations begins with correctly designed CSS,
and can even include a separate set of UI elements
to be swapped in via user agent detection (browser).
An example of a good candidate for a separate UI
would be any page that requires too much scrolling,
or scrolling that is not intuitive to the experience.
Removing points of registration/authentication/
navigation friction peculiar to mobile devices can
have significant impact on conversions as well as on
repeat visits.
Just like your entire mobile site, your registration flow
should be optimized for the mobile web with small-
screen use cases in mind. Having a well-implemented
social login option for mobile-enabled sites removes
Know Your Customer
Optimize registration on your mobile apps and website to reduce frustration and increase account creation . TIP 3
Don’t assume everyone wants to log in with Facebook or Twitter . Find the right identity provider mix for your audience .
TIP 2
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a common mobile registration frustration by potentially
limiting the fields of entry down to one to two for the
selected identity provider.
Leverage Progressive Profiling to Increase ConversionsIn any new relationship, it takes time to get to know one
another and build trust before feeling comfortable
enough to reveal more personal information than the
basics. The relationship with visitors to your site is no
different. They may not be ready and willing to share
their home address, birthday, or friends’ names—
personal details—with you during their first visit to
your site.
Progressive profiling refers to an incremental approach
to collecting profile data from website visitors. Using
this method, you request smaller snippets of user
profile data at carefully staged opportunities. So rather
than being asked to complete a long form, or submit
volumes of personal information up front, the user has a
smoother and more comfortable experience. In this way,
progressive profiling builds consumer trust over time,
which encourages the sharing of information, and allows
you to collect more accurate user profile data while
maintaining a higher conversion rate.
Born in the world of B2B marketing, progressive
profiling is growing in use with consumer brands
as well. This approach is particularly valuable when
users engage with your website repeatedly, over a
span of weeks or months. It requires building some
conditional checking into your sign-in workflow
and forms so your site can correctly gauge when to
prompt a user for specific additional information.
Opportunities to request additional profile information
include user events such as sharing content or
products to a social network, finding friends who are
also on the site, rating a product or leaving a review, or
even revealing more localized content.
Another example of progressive profiling in practice
is offering an exchange of value. This is where you
offer your users a quid pro quo by granting them
access to a download, a discount, additional site
features, or some similar benefit in exchange for
sharing additional information about themselves. If
what you’re offering can be directly correlated to the
information you’re requesting, your success rate will
improve. The bottom line is to be clear about what
data you are asking for and why you are asking for
it, and to make sure that the context for the requests
is appropriate to the the users’ actions or value
exchange messaging.
PROGRESSIVE PROFILING
Know Your Customer
Request minimal information at the initial point of registration, and look for opportunities to request additional snippets of data over time to progressively build user profiles .
TIP 4
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Improving Profile Data Quality
A database is only as valuable as the quality of data
within it, and with 88% of consumers admitting that
they have provided incomplete or false information on
traditional registration forms, your database may not
contain the quality data you need. Poor data quality
can cost an organization 10–20% of annual revenue in
lost sales, ineffective direct marketing, administration
overhead, and preventable shipping errors.
One approach to improving data quality is by
offering social login. People typically keep
their social profile details current, as well as
representative of their authentic self, since these
are channels through which they communicate with
family, friends and co-workers. When site visitors
choose an existing identity using social login to
create an account, you can rest assured you are on
your way to building a user profile that is rich with
accurate, actionable information.
Providing a means for users to automatically and
manually map social accounts with their existing site
user records can help you to avoid duplicate records
while giving you the opportunity to gather accurate
user intelligence from outside sources. With user
profile pages, you can allow people to self-manage
their public and private profiles on the site, as well
as allow them to map multiple social profiles to one
user record. This also gives registered users an
opportunity to provide additional data they want you
to have, details of their persona they may want to
share with other members of a community in their
public profile, and allows them to more seamlessly
carry out some action like sharing.
Data ValidationBuilding sensible data validation rules right into
your registration system is another important
consideration. Our recommendation is a hybrid
strategy that includes a two-part approach for
validation of standard fields built in to your
registration system, including length and type
validation at the front end, paired with the
appropriate database constraints on the back end.
An example of a front-end validation task for sites
that are available to younger users, or that need
be compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy
Protection Act (COPPA) standards, would be to parse
suggested usernames through dirty word filters to
ensure that they don’t contain offensive words.
When leveraging social login on your site, you not
only smooth the user’s return experience, but you
can access profile data during registration to pre-
Garbage In, Garbage Out Improving Profile Data Quality
Improve the quality and depth of your user database by tapping into social profiles .TIP 5
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populate a form which then just needs validation by
the user. When taking this approach, you want to
include clear messaging before and after the social
authentication about the data you want to access
and how doing so is a benefit to them, or you will
confuse most users and thus degrade their on-
site experience. Upon each return visit to the site,
changes to their social profile should refresh the
profile fields in your database to ensure you always
have the most current information.
Email Verification Adding an email verification step to the registration
flow has become a common step to ensure your
new user is human and is providing a valid email
address at which you can later contact them. This
is an important exercise for marketers in the pursuit
of data integrity, and an efficient use of marketing
dollars spent against ensuring database quality.
Unfortunately, for most website visitors, this
places yet another obstacle between them and
the action they wanted to take on your site, and
creates additional opportunity for them to leave.
Our recommendation here is to use this two-
step verification only when necessary (contest
registration, for example). If you have other
verification methods in place, like CAPTCHA or
social login, you can usually forgo this additional
step in the registration process.
Improving Profile Data Quality
Pre-populate fields with as much data as possible and ask users to confirm the accuracy to ensure high quality data without requiring them to enter the data .
TIP 6
Networks that provide verified email addresses
Yahoo!
Windows Live
PayPal
Salesforce
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When users choose an identity from Google,
Facebook, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, or another provider to
sign in, they are also providing you with a verified
email address which removes the necessity of
this additional burden. Make sure you request
permission to access the email address, and if you
need to make the user choose a specific email
address (such as a business-related one), pre-
populate their account creation form with this data
so they don’t need to enter it themselves.
Samsung reported a 34% increase in email open
rates and 63% increase in email click-through rates
as a result of improved email marketability of their
user database with social login. With more than
40% of new registrants choosing to use social login
to register at their site, this gives them access to
a verified email without the hassle of the two-step
verification they previously used.
CAPTCHA Spam PreventionData integrity and quality concerns also apply to
user-generated content. Though it is too expensive
to hand-moderate every post and comment, there are
a few basic steps that you can take to prevent rampant
abuse of your public spaces. The first is requiring
registration and authentication before allowing posts/
comments, and another is some sort of human-
verification (Turing test) tool for first time registrations.
Many of the tools for incorporating a Turing test into
your site (such as CAPTCHA) are free, but the task
of implementing them and staying on top of new
releases is not. Ensure that your registration solution
supports CAPTCHA functionality “out of the box” to
reduce your development burden.
Improving Profile Data Quality
Remove the email validation step in your main registration process by requesting a verified email from social providers with social login .TIP 7
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Improve Your Registration Experience
When users get frustrated while trying to sign up for
an account or sign in to your site with a username
and password they’ve forgotten, they have three
options: keep trying and let the frustration increase,
ask for help (if available), or leave your site. All three
options are costly for you as you’ve either lost a
potential sale, or will spend resources to help them
remember or reset their password. One important
goal of any registration system must include
improving customer service for these very reasons.
Lost Login CredentialsWith 40% of people admitting to using the Forgot
Password feature at least once a month, this is a
growing challenge for users as they create more
username/password combinations across the web (or
worse yet, re-use the same credentials). People have
come to expect an easy way to get access to your
site when this happens, or they will potentially leave.
Having a secure method for verifying your users’
requests for lost credentials, and taking the
necessary steps to integrate it into your existing
registration flow, must be part of the registration
system design stage. In order to keep the trust you
have worked hard to build with your audience, take
the necessary steps to avoid exposing information
(such as passwords) that would leave users
vulnerable to a potential breach.
The most universally applicable best practice for
password resets is sending a one-time-use link to a
secure page on your site, where the user can reset
the password, to their primary email address. Never
include users’ passwords in an email when they
request a password recovery, register for the first
time, or reset their password.
With social login enabled on your site, you remove
the hurdle of remembering an additional username
and password, thus removing the additional
Who Are You?Improve your registration experience to enhance customer service
Key considerations for your Forgot Password flow must include ease and security with which users can retrieve or reset their password .TIP 8
2 in 5 feel that scrubbing a toilet would be better than coming up with a new password
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Forgot Password obstacle to entering your site,
and potential customer service resources. When
shoppers at a commerce site, in particular, are
ready to buy and can’t remember their username or
password, the easier option is to leave and purchase
at another site that solves this problem for them, or
check out with a guest account, which leaves you
little quality contact data to use in future marketing
programs. The best practice for preventing this
dilemma is to encourage users to choose the social
option for creating an account on your site, and
having them easily reuse that identity on return visits.
User Profile PagesToday’s users, being savvy about the web and social
media, expect to be provided with tools to manage
the data they share with you and the public and to
control how and when you or other site users can
contact them. When your site includes community
features like blogs, comments, or reviews, people
will always want the ability to manage their public
persona on your site. This is best done through a
profile page that enables them to change their vital
stats, interests, notification methods and frequency,
avatar image or photo, etc. Giving users control
over their profiles (both public and private) in this
way can help people be more comfortable sharing
information with you, and in turn decrease the
amount of inaccurate profile data you collect.
Profile management screens should, at minimum,
provide the ability to specify information as public
or private at a field level, the ability to change their
password if applicable, and manage the social
identities they have associated with their profile.
Improve Your Registration Experience
Offer users profile pages to manage what personal data is public or private, and to map additional social identities to their profile on your site .TIP 9
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Registration Infrastructure
World-class registration systems don’t just happen
by accident, nor do they come for free. Creating a site
experience that supports the business objective of
converting anonymous site visitors to registered users
requires strategic planning and critical consideration
of all aspects of the registration infrastructure. Proper
attention to the details of your registration flow will
help to reduce user frustration, protect the data you
collect, and future-proof your solution.
Supporting Multiple Social NetworksAs was previously mentioned, presenting more than
one option for social login is important. So if you’re
planning to implement social login on your own and
not use an “off-the-shelf” solution, it’s important to
consider the number of disparate social network
APIs your developers will need to learn, support,
and maintain. Each social network has its own set
of APIs, which can result in significant up-front
development costs and ongoing code maintenance
of your site to keep pace with changes to each
social network API.
The optimal solution for this challenge is an
abstraction layer or single, unified API that handles
all social network interactions for your site,
eliminating the need to learn any specific social
network APIs. The additional peace of mind—
knowing that your direct API connection won’t break
as providers make updates or changes—means
less resources dedicated to the mundane task of
ensuring that your customers can still access their
accounts and new visitors can still sign up with
those third-party credentials.
Terms of ServiceAn important step when registering a new user
is to capture his or her acknowledgement and
acceptance of your terms of service (TOS). It seems
pretty straightforward; and it can be, at least the
first time. But if your organization needs to update
those terms of service, you’ll need to ensure that
your users have accepted the most recent version,
and store that information, and do so in a way that
doesn’t annoy them with another box to click, and
possibly drive them away from your site.
Ensure that your registration system can
track updates to your TOS automatically, and
consequently remind customers to acknowledge
these updates as part of your normal sign-in flow
if they haven’t already. Not all systems include this
functionality, and it’s easy to overlook its importance
until a problem arises. So, include this on your
checklist of requirements.
Registration InfrastructureBehind the scenes of a best-in-class registration system
Consider a single unified API to manage and support multiple network APIs . TIP 10
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Database SchemaWhen thinking about ways to ensure data integrity
within your registration system, it is imperative to
enforce structure and rules for profile information
that is stored by leveraging data types and a well-
designed schema. A carefully-defined schema
typically results in more-accessible data, which
makes for faster and easier queries and more-
granular customer segments. Having a well-thought-
out schema also better enables the feeding of user
profile data into different systems (such as email
marketing, business intelligence, or personalization
engines) for targeted campaigns, better business
decisions, and more effective programs. When
designing your schema, be sure to include all the fields
you need to record, use the correct data types for all
fields, and don’t try to use the profile store for more-
granular transactional data (such as raw clickstreams).
Storing Unified DataConventional profile data, when combined with
social profile data and other user information, can
provide a full 360-degree view of your users that
can then be leveraged to maximize digital marketing
efforts and enhance the site experience of those
users (both directly and indirectly).
Strategically designing your user store today, to
account for the data returned by the variety of social
networks that you’re likely to support tomorrow, can
present a challenge. Having a unified API that also
normalizes the data from the various providers into a
single format is extremely helpful. Pre-planning your
schema to be capable of accepting all of the data
Registration Infrastructure
Make sure your registration system monitors updates to your TOS to effectively manage the appropriate user acknowledgements .TIP 11
Future-proof your user database by planning your schema today for tomorrow’s unidentified needs so that you can maximize the usability of the data you collect .
TIP 12
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that each of the providers can return is critical to
the smooth growth of your integration, whether you
choose to act on that data today or not. Also make
sure to store the data from the different providers
side by side, without overwriting similar fields’
values (email for example).
Even if you’re not currently planning to store
information about your registered users beyond their
authentication details, you still need to consider a
solution that provides an easy migration path for
when your business needs change, and the ability
to store richer user profiles (not to mention mine
such data for targeting and segmentation) becomes
important. In short, your registration and database
solution should ensure that you have a clear
path to future expansion and expression as your
requirements change, and the flexibility to handle
unexpected integration requirements.
PasswordsBy now everyone knows that you need to encrypt
your users’ sign-in credentials, but how do you
handle encryption considerations when importing
and migrating user data?
All too frequently, media headlines share news of
some high-profile website’s account profile system
being hacked and the credentials getting into the
wrong hands. In order to combat this, account
data must be encrypted well enough to withstand
brute-force attacks that are the inevitable result
of garnering a large base of user information.
The encryption should always be handled
programmatically, and password comparisons should
always be handled in an encrypted state.
However, sometimes user stores need to be
merged or users migrated from legacy systems.
These scenarios can present significant challenges
to staying compliant with best practices, and
sometimes legislation, related to data-handling
and maintaining a good user experience. The two
most common solutions, since de-encrypting the
passwords is not a best practice (or legal in some
jurisdictions) are to:
1. Ask your users to choose a new password
(which creates a poor user experience)
2. Programmatically re-encrypt passwords
(which is time consuming, involves significant
downtime, and may create a compliance issue)
A user store that can support password hashes at
the user record level eliminates the need to force
users to change their passwords, or to schedule
significant downtime and develop some sort of
re-encryption routine. Since passwords can be
migrated while still encrypted, along with the
hashing keys that encrypted them, your users and
their data can transition seamlessly.
Load HandlingIf your business holds online events or promotions
that might (hopefully) cause a surge of traffic to
your site, it’s important to architect and provision
Registration Infrastructure
Protect your business, reputation, and user data security by never transmitting passwords unencrypted or revealing them via email .TIP 13
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your code and infrastructure to withstand spikes in
registration and sign-in activity. Do you know how
many concurrent transactions your authentication
and registration system should be able to support?
Or how your page loading times will be affected
during such peaks?
One technique for shortening load times is to
leverage the browser’s ability to load code and
resources asynchronously, by placing properly
designed JavaScript in the HEAD of the web page.
The HEAD section often loads fastest by a significant
margin on many modern, dynamic pages. Using one
of several “non-blocking” design patterns prevents
the JavaScript execution from delaying (blocking)
other content from being loaded or rendered. A very
basic example of one way of achieving this idea is
using the defer attribute on <script> tags:
<script type=”text/javascript” defer src=”foo.js”></
script>
Widgets should be loaded as static content from a
content distribution network that puts them relatively
close to the user. Also, correctly using CSS3/HTML5,
and not loading widgets or other dynamic elements
within iframes, can speed up load times even more.
Registration Infrastructure
Plan today for potential surges in site traffic related to marketing promotions or events to ensure your registration systems have been designed to deal with peak loads .
TIP 14
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Last Name*
Email Address*
Re-enter Email Address*
Birth Date*
Another Tedious Question*
Username*
Password*
Re-enter password*
YesN o Conclusion
Clearly, there are many critical elements to consider
when developing or updating an online
user registration system. Simultaneously attempting to reduce friction in order to
increase your user base, while still collecting the information you need about your
users, requires a very deft approach. Ensure that your site’s design elements and data-
collection workflow blend together to increase conversions and foster trust from the
users whose information you seek to acquire.
As a final suggestion, to free your development resources to focus on the core
competency of your business, consider implementing a user management platform
solution for which design and workflow considerations have been market-tested by
major brands, and refined over time to provide best-in-class approaches to user data
collection, validation, and infrastructure.
Copyright © 2012 Janrain, Inc. All rights reserved. Best Practices in Online Registration | www.janrain.com | 888.563.3082 PG17
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About Janrain
The Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP) helps organizations succeed on the social web by providing leading
technology to leverage the popularity of social networks and identities for user acquisition, engagement, and
enhanced customer intelligence. Our solutions, including social login, social sharing, social profile data collection
and storage, access to the social graph, and digital strategy services, improve the effectiveness of online marketing
initiatives for leading brands like Fox, Universal Music Group, Whole Foods, MTV, Purina, Samsung, Macy’s and Dr
Pepper. Founded in 2005, Janrain is based in Portland, Oregon. For more information, please call 1-888-563-3082 or
visit www.janrain.com and follow @janrain.