What makes users register?

Question

First off - I want users to register on my site. It's a site for image sharing, sort of like imgur.com. But what makes a user on a website register? I have people coming back to my site but they -never- register. They sometimes comment on content that I have, but for some reason they see no interest in registering.

How do I convey the advantages of registering? What kind of advantages should I offer?

The existing incentives I offer are:

• An individual username
• More powers, including:
  • The rights to edit one's own content
  • The ability to start gaining points (which can be spent in a shop for 'extras') for actions you do.
  • Increased voting powers

I suspect the existing barriers to registration on my site are:

• that registeration is annoying
• that users are uncomfortable giving person information
• that users fear registration will be time consuming (though it actually takes 14 seconds.)
• that users fear an awkward mail validation process (not present)
• that users dislike CAPTCHAs (present)
• that users already have accounts, but don't re-sign in for whatever reason.

Possible ways to get people to sign up

• Show them how little time they'll have to put in
• Explaining the advantages (maybe a seperate page)
• Being clear about what will happen with the info, TOS/privacy policy
• Providing a "forgot password" page for those who simply can't re-login
• Improving the design of the registration form
• Purging unnecessary questions from the registration form
• Letting guests use the site before registering

I have come to the realization that my incentives might not be up to par with what I believed them to be.

The site, and the notifications on errors are not 100% User friendly, but this is a new version I'm testing (people don't register anyway ;))

My funny pictures site ;)

Answer 1

First, as others said, people want to see that it'll be worth it before they register. That means (1) let them use the site in some reduced form (like it sounds like you're doing, and like StackExchange does for instance), and (2) communicate benefits that matter to them. For an image-storing site, it seems like being able to manage your images/albums would be a pretty big benefit, versus posting once into the wild and never being able to edit or remove it later.

Second and just as important: you need to clearly mitigate the user's concerns about harm. Harm takes several forms:

• Giving up an email address leads to spam: yeah yeah, link your privacy policy and TOS, but when you ask for an email address also say "will be used only for (whatever)". Otherwise some users won't register and others will give bogus email addresses (and your email to them will fail).

• If it's really a 14-second process, say that! ThinkGeek does this for customer surveys (I don't remember if they do it for registration; been a while); they'll say "takes 30 seconds" so people know they aren't walking into a time-suck. I've also seen (forget where) "just two questions" and that sort of thing. Communicate that this is fast.

• Privacy: don't ask for anything you don't need. If you do ask, make it clear that it's optional. Otherwise, as with the email address, your results are suspect.

• "Oh sigh, another ID/password to manage!": I don't have any data to back this up, but I have the impression from watching less-technical family members that having a "forgot ID or password?" link right there next to the login form makes a difference up front. I think it alleviates the fear that they'll forget it and be locked out -- "oh look, I can get it back somehow". This also reduces the number of "password" (or "password1" :-) ) logins you'll have. :-)

Finally, others have brought up OpenID. Notice what StackExchange does: you can log in to any site just by using an existing ID somewhere, but if you take the extra step of registering that account with SE you get things like a real name (not user7890) and email notifications. But you don't have to do that to start using the site; you can do it later. I don't know what SE's conversion rate is, but I don't see a lot of user4321s running around compared to names.

Answer 2

Users never really want to register, that's the first thing; registration places a barrier between them and a 'goal'. If you are going to make users register, make it as painless as possible; e.g. login with Facebook or other common service providers, and make sure you explain clearly why users should register, e.g. for benefits, rewards, etc.; I really can't think of many reasons why users may want to signup for a service they have not yet used, unless the site is pretty convincing in conveying the reasons why, like -ahem- http://achica.com/(*)

You may want to think about passive registration: let users use your services, for free, and when they want to save, upgrade, etc. then ask for more details at this point. http://mashupforge.com/ is a pretty good example.

Summary:

• Don't force users to register
• If you insist on forced registration, outline benefits clearly
• Use passive registration as a means of capturing user data and encouraging repeat visits
• Use OpenID to smooth registration

(*)This is a bit of an in-joke: achica forces registration before users can use the shop, but it this is part of a 'brand building' exercise. It's an example of a -fairly risky- dangling carrot registration process, if that makes sense.

Answer 3

users do not want to register for fear of being spammed or their email sold to others. And, the time, even 14 seconds is too long if I am just trying to get an image.

Answer 4

One lovely example I saw in rb.trends via techcrunch recently was Codeacademy. They don't ask you to sign up but entice you in with a simple progression. Given their purpose the progression is through JavaScript coding exercises. When you are ready to leave they let you know that to save your progress you'll need to sign in. It works well.

Answer 5

Some good points raised here.

I strongly suggest you read the story of the $300m button. Jared Spool outlines some problems with online registration. It may not be 100% applicable to your case, but there's plenty to think about.

Answer 6

Given that it sounds like your site is more of a consumer-directed offering, OpenID, at least in the vein of SE, might be even more of a registration barrier. I've noticed that most OpenID sites (like the SE family) cater to fairly technical people, so your audience might not already have a usable sign-in or might not know that they do.

Instead of generic OpenID, I would investigate using Facebook sign-in, which technically is an OpenID provider I believe. Besides making it easy, people are accustomed to this method of registration/authentication, and you do get access to information a user would likely never want to enter into your registration form. This method of registration may be more appropriate to your site's focus, too.