Gradual Engagement: Build Engagement, Not Barriers

I love A List Apart; it’s certainly one of the best websites out there on website design. We are not talking just web design as in “just cool graphics,” but big picture, user-centered design philosophy kinda stuff, presented in a way you can use in practical every day scenarios.

I especially liked their recent article Sign Up Forms Must Die:

I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

Photo by Tuis

Don’t you hate those in-your-face forms? Don’t you hate barriers? I do.

I strongly believe that engaging a user in your site is the main goal of most websites. Registrations are a nice metric and marketers, accountants and other people that have to show reports and be accountable love to show registration numbers. But it might not be the best strategy to build a strong user base.

Throwing a barrier in front of a potential user before they see the value in your site is a lot like asking a customer in a car showroom to sign a sales contract before he or she has test driven a car. WHY would anybody be interested in committing BEFORE they see the value?

But web architects still continue to throw registration forms in the users face well before the user has had a chance to see the value a website / web service provides. (See my recent rant about Kodak Easyshare.)

Better to lure them in, reveal value a piece at a time and make registration part of the unfolding process. Quid pro quo: I show you some value, you give me a little information, OK? It keeps the users interested and \motivated to take the next gradual step of engagement.

Unless of course, you like registration forms.

I love the article. Well written, excellent examples. If you design websites, do read it, please!

Drupal Modules: Rank, Rate, Review at DrupalModules.com

I usually don’t get all gooey and gushy when I write up a website, but this is one I like a lot: DrupalModules.com built by John Forsythe.

DrupalModules.com does a great job of taking the list of Drupal Module (which was nothing more than a raw information dump on the Drupal site) and wrapping it with a smattering of practical community features and thereby turning it into an extremely useful resource for Drupal developers.

It’s not only the site itself that shines, the people that use it are doing a bang-up job with the information they are contributing. The reviews are generally well written, they give examples of how people have used the modules in real life to solve problems and they link to other off site resources (examples of the module in action, tutorials) that help clarify what the module can do and how it does it.

In comparison, Drupal.org lists the modules and has a short blurb–usually written by the maintainer who, even though he knows the module the best, often does a terrible job explaining the modules capabilities and uses. Lots of data, not much information.

DrupalModules.com is a big step forward.

By the way, John has also developed a nifty search engine for sifting through the Drupal code base appropriately called DrupalCodeSearch.com.