Advice to OpenID: give me a SIGNUP button
I just needed to sign up for OpenID - yeah, I was lazy to do it until now - and so I went to the OpenID page. And, instead of being served a huge signup button, i had to look for a way to actually sign up for the service for 5 minutes. Now, I’m sure that some users will find it quicker than me, but I’m also sure that many will be annoyed and leave in the first 5 seconds.
Wake up call: you’re losing users with this attitude. Let me help you and show you how it should be done.
See that? That’s how you make sure people actually sign up for your service.
It’s the same mistake that Mozilla did in its beginnings, when their homepage had huge amounts of information about bug reporting, nightlies, open source, the community, but the download link was nowhere to be found. And the download-spree started only after they’ve wisened up.
Oh yeah, and if you want to sign up for your OpenID, do it here.
May 15th, 2007 at 9:18 am
It’s ok that there is no sign up button on the OpenID.net site because for an OpenID you have to register with an OpenID provider like MyOpenID.com which you have mentioned. While (most) OpenID providers are working together on the specs they are also competitors, so to which provider should a big button link to?
May 15th, 2007 at 10:28 am
@Carsten: Thanks for clarifying that. And while I was guessing that there was a reason for the lack of a simple signup option, users won’t care about that. If you want people to adopt your product/technology, you have to make it easy for them to sign up. If there is more than one provider, link to all of them.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:14 am
[…] Stan Schroeder of franticindustries blog has a good article on OpenID which is worth thinking about and that is revealing one of the weak sides of it: its lack of promotion to end users. Stan is missing a big sign up button on the site. […]
June 19th, 2009 at 10:05 am
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