11 August 2009
How to Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas
As everyone knows, captchas can be a real nightmare. Besides their serious accessibility issues (have you ever clicked the “Hear a set of words”?) they’re a real pain in the ass to enter.
It can be very discouraging to a visitor if they have to re-enter the captcha text every time they make a mistake on the form. So frustrating in fact, that they’re likely to give up after making a couple mistakes.
Here’s an example from the Gmail signup, of how not to do it:
Yesterday, I came across a great way to handle this. When you’re signing up for Twitter and you enter the captcha correctly, but make a mistake on another field (like email address), it removes the captcha which means you don’t have to enter it again. Hoorah!
I’m not sure if Twitter has A/B tested this screen, but I’d bet a chunk of change that it improves signup rates significantly.
On a side note, if you’re a frontend developer, you’ll enjoy two awesome talks by Britt and Dustin from Twitter:
- “The Future of Frontend Engineering – Learning from Twitter” by Britt Selvitelle
- “The Future of JavaScript Design Patterns – Unleashing Full Object-Oriented Capability” by Dustin Diaz
Read more at The Future of Web Apps site.
Enjoy this article?
If you liked this article, feel free to re-tweet it to let others know. Thanks, we appreciate it :)
We love .net Magazine
We're big fans of .net so they've hooked us up with a rad deal: Save 50 percent on your subscription.
Jordan Moore
# August 11, 2009 - 8:03 am
Alternatively, you could use inline validation before the form is sent to avoid filling in those horrible captchas over and over. Although this is a good non-JavaScript solution.
Ryan Carson
# August 11, 2009 - 8:17 am
They’re actually already doing that – it’s a great combo of the methodologies.
Dave Sparks
# August 11, 2009 - 8:05 am
Would be interesting to get some figures for A/B testing like you mentioned, but certainly a good example to follow
Tobin Harris
# August 11, 2009 - 8:28 am
Nice tip!
Another thing that I do is to hide the captcha until gets to the filling in password verification field. My thinking is that this makes the form less of a visual/conceptual burden on first appearances, so less likely to scare them off.
Martin Tajur
# August 11, 2009 - 8:44 am
What we did with our Stop Killing Dogs online petition (located at http://www.uniteddogs.com/stopkillingdogs ) was that we introduced three images – each containing a silhouette of an animal. One of the three was a dog and the order of these images was always different. The visitor had to indicate which of the images was a dog. Of course, this approach has implications with accessibility, but we keep on thinking and improving. Perhaps it can be solved with audio or textual captions (e.g. using onomatopoeia-like words for alt=”" parameters that represent the sound each animal makes – woof-woof, oink oink, etc)
Fahed
# August 11, 2009 - 9:48 am
Amazingly enough, I just created a Twitter account about 10 minutes ago and experienced this very thing when the email address was recognised as already being in use.
What I would recommend, though, which is what we implemented on my other company’s redesign (yet to go live), is to use some other form of bot recognition first. If the form’s submission was suspicious in any way, then ask the user to do a captcha.
This way, the vast majority of innocent people need not be bothered by it at all. And the few suspicious ones pay the price for being suspicious.
Design for Delight « Ami Rotter | UX Designer
# August 11, 2009 - 1:01 pm
[...] July 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment A great example from Carsonified on » How to Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas [...]
John
# August 11, 2009 - 2:49 pm
Where are the two awesome talks by Britt and Dustin? I can’t find them though google.
Ryan Carson
# August 11, 2009 - 2:52 pm
You can see the whole schedule here: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/schedule
John
# August 11, 2009 - 3:00 pm
Thanks Ryan. I appreciate it very much if you can record and share the videos after the conference. It’s too difficulty for me to go abroad and join the conference.
Michel Tel
# August 11, 2009 - 3:27 pm
Great use of interaction design and usability. Glad to see there are some real good examples, that don’t frustrate the users.
Angelina
# August 11, 2009 - 5:05 pm
Thanks Ryan for good examples and for sharing with us.
Lingerie Lori Dell
# August 11, 2009 - 11:08 pm
Captchas are such a pain.. Yet necessary to fight the spam, there are times that I know for a “fact”there in NO way anybody can make them out… Some people just have too much fun thinking about what hell they are putting people through. It is a good idea to remove the captcha once it is correct… Yea!
Michael Troy
# August 12, 2009 - 2:23 am
Even better would be an article on alternatives to using captcha. I’d love to see some creative examples and solutions. I like what @Martin Tajur had to say. This is an acceptable solution as it was in context with the subject matter.
hire london bus
# August 12, 2009 - 8:57 am
i like this article. it is very knowledge ful article.
hire london bus
My daily readings 08/12/2009 « Strange Kite
# August 12, 2009 - 11:39 am
[...] Carsonified » How to Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas [...]
Best of the Week #78 | X Design Blog
# August 15, 2009 - 3:04 pm
[...] How to Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas [...]
Best of the Week #78 - Programming Blog
# August 15, 2009 - 11:21 pm
[...] How to Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas [...]
Carsonified » 10 User Interface Design Fundamentals
# August 17, 2009 - 7:31 am
[...] A great example can be seen in How to increase signups with easier captchas. [...]
10 User Interface Design Fundamentals « Vleerkatcreations
# August 17, 2009 - 12:01 pm
[...] A great example can be seen in How to increase signups with easier captchas. [...]
10 User Interface Design Fundamentals - Programming Blog
# August 18, 2009 - 12:04 am
[...] A great example can be seen in How to increase signups with easier captchas. [...]
10 User Interface Design Fundamentals | huibit05.com
# August 20, 2009 - 1:14 pm
[...] A great example can be seen in How to increase signups with easier captchas. [...]
So macht man Captchas nur noch halb so nervig… – uxzentrisch
# August 21, 2009 - 10:17 am
[...] Ryan Carson hat diesen Fall entdeckt und schön mit Screenshots in seinem Blog dokumentiert: »How to Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas«. [...]
Captcha « Arquiteta de Informação
# August 28, 2009 - 6:43 pm
[...] Acessar a matéria [...]
用户界面设计10原则 | 互联网的那点事
# September 15, 2009 - 1:30 pm
[...] 如何利用简单的验证码提高注册率一文中讲述了一个绝佳的例子。 [...]
No_limits43
# October 22, 2009 - 10:53 am
Then to the Supreme Court for visits with some of them . ,
Hunde statt Captchas – uxzentrisch
# November 19, 2009 - 1:45 pm
[...] der Petition von Stop Killing Dogs (via) kann man eine andere Lösung sehen, wie man Maschinen davon abhält, automatisiert ein Formular [...]