Jeff Atwood wrote about the login barrier a few days ago, and I found it to be an interesting read, confirming our real-world experience with opening up Skweezer to the anonymous masses a few years ago. His basic point is that by hiding functionality behind a login/sign-up screen, sites turn users away. His conclusion:
If your application requires users to log in, don’t underestimate the impact of the login barrier you’re presenting to users. Consider utilizing anonymous, cookie-based accounts to give users a complete experience that more closely resembles the experience that named users get. By removing the login barrier and blurring the line between anonymous users and named users, you’re likely to gain a lot more of the latter.
As onerous as that barrier is to normal users, it is much worse for mobile users who have to triple-tap out passwords through multiple screens to fill in a form, God help them if they misspell their password and have to do it twice. Once we had the courage to open Skweezer to anonymous users, however, usage skyrocketed. In an attempt to quantify “skyrocket”, if memory serves me correctly, we received more unique anonymous users in the month following the switch than we had seen visit Skweezer in the prior two years combined. Oddly enough this eventually caused a spike in registered users also, as Jeff predicted above. Increased usage forced us to grow server capacity, which enabled even higher traffic, which in turn made us serious contenders for larger partnerships, and the cycle continues. Today Skweezer handles hundreds of thousands of users each week on the public site as opposed to just a few thousand subscribers per month. We just celebrated our 150 millionth page. Our revenue today is much higher than the “lost” subscription revenue, not to mention the priceless partnership opportunities that have been opened by our enterprise-grade capacity. You can’t get big unless you’re able to grow. I can’t wait to celebrate the next Skweezer milestones that are coming soon: the first million-user week, the first million-page day, and so on.
Looking back, it is clear that our perceived need for mandatory registration was a relic of our old business model to directly charge users a subscription for access. As for the future of Skweezer account registration, we will continue to allow anonymous site usage and will endeavor to leave sign up for only the actions that absolutely require it, such as saving favorites. My personal wish is to enable OpenID sign up someday in order to reduce the steps of the mobile user’s registration even more.
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