Saw this on the bottom of the Moof homepage – Moof, social music, reinvented. If you aren’t sure you are aligning your Purpose as a host with the Purpose of prospective members, if you aren’t sure you have Value Systems sorted, if you don’t have a cool Welcome Visitor centre, if you fail on everything else as a social networking site, at least drop the Barrier to Entry. Seriously…
Good isn’t it? No clicking through, no hideous signup, no asking for birthdays or family income. Plain, simple, easy to do.
Just like this post. Hah.
PS. moof actually do have a lot of the other features right, so an easy signup is simply a bonus!
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Hey Laurel,
I followed your original Tweet and have been checking out the MOOF service. All looks very interesting and I couldn’t agree more with your post about the sign-up process. I noticed it too – it’s great that they have innovated around what many sites just overlook as an important touch-point with their prospective and current users.
P.S. I’m probably crazily late in saying it but I love the new site – so cute and clean and fun – great stuff. Is it a premium theme or a custom job?
Scott Drummond´s last blog ..On being a man and losing a loved one
thank you poppet!
http://www.elegantthemes.com/join.php – 20 bucks for the year and unlimited downloads of the premium themes. I forget which on this is but it had a PINK option.
I agree with some of the points about alignment with values and not asking for too much information. But i’d query whether or not it makes it easier to use or facilitates faster signup. This kind of thing has been done before and the same issues apply now as did then. I wonder how accessible it is when you remove tags and meaning from a form or how non-english speakers would log in.
Lots of assumptions are made when you add the requirement of language specific semantics to the parsing / completion of a form.
Completely agree. The “tell us your story” signup has been done, since, forever and while cutesy, not as great a value add as the other features this one has such as it being on the home page and not having to click thru onto another page, only 3 field and so on.
I did like the humour – but that never translates well. In fact, usually anything I like, even other English language speakers struggle to understand. Gah!
Still, not enough social network hosts play with their membership, so any attempt at lightness is great in my book (Flickr’s “don’t be creepy” in signup comes to mind).