A Way Back

Taste first, Pay later

In the Indian sweet shops it’s common practice that people taste every sweet they want to buy. That gives them better feeling and idea of the real taste before they actually pay for it. On the web we have similar practice called Gradual Engagement, where we first let the users try the website/web application before asking them to sign up.

What is Gradual Engagement?

In simple words of Luke Wroblewski:

“Gradual engagement is an alternative to the all too common sign-up form. I’m sure you’ve encountered your fair share. You come across a new Web service and the first thing you need to do is fill out a registration form. As a new customer experience, that sucks.”

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In his recent articles: Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Ups by 29%, Luke sheds more light on this topic and compares the difference made by following Gradual Engagement.

How I used this approach?

After reading Web Form design, my approach has changed for designing web applications and sign up process. Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to work on the redesign of Proprofs.com’s Quiz-School website.

In the previous Quiz-School design, the quiz making process was generic – click the call-to-action button, sign-in/sign-up and start creating quiz. Users have to spend time in registration process before they have any idea of how things will work after signing up. It is not sure if they will be actually using the site for creating quizzes or just leave it forever.

I thought of using Gradual Engagement by allowing users to create their quiz first (Step 2.1) and then sign-in/sign-up (Step 5.1) to share their quiz afterwards. No doubt this will also take same time as the usual process does, but in this case the user has better idea of the product.

In this project I also enhanced other quiz-creation-forms so that they make more sense and are usable.

Refreshed and Realigned

Apart from enhancing user-experience and improving usability in quiz creation process I also redesigned their homepage to achieve their goals.

2 Comments

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• 
  # Joshua Lay
  says on July 22

  Great redesign Amrinder!

  You’re gratifying the visitors reason for engagement with the site first. There’s no thought interrupt until they’ve achieved their task of creating the quiz.

  More and more I see sign up first as a huge roadblock to even bother with a site. Since the web is so big there’s always another option out there. Unless it’s a really niche market.

  What I hate are some news sites, usually the off springs of real publications, requiring you to sign up before you can read an article. How do I know it’s something worth reading before bothering with membership? I’ll just read elsewhere.

• 
  # Lux
  says on July 22

  Interesting! Now I have a better idea why you evangelized this ‘gradual engagement’ approach for EyesAndFeet.com too.

  After our launch, I guess you can talk about this too 🙂

  Great work on our UX, by the way.

  Lux
  Founder, eyesandfeet.com