May 27, 2004

User registration – not the way?

I had a chance to talk with my friend Adrian the other day while he was in Atlanta on a lay­over from a Poyn­ter conference.

We got to talk­ing about some­thing we mutu­ally detest… user registration.

User reg­is­tra­tion, I think, is merely a bad imple­men­ta­tion of a real busi­ness (and edi­to­r­ial) con­cern — that is, get­ting to know your audi­ence.

We should want to know more about our audi­ence — it allows us to pro­vide better con­tent and advertising.

Had our print breth­ern tried to gather more infor­ma­tion about their audi­ence, ear­lier in the game, then cir­cu­la­tion (and maybe the entire con­cept of a news­pa­per) wouldn’t be in the bad shape it is today.

Let’s recap: * Get­ting to know your audi­ence — good * User reg­is­tra­tion (in its cur­rent form) — bad

Over the next few entries, I’d like to tackle imag­in­ing an alter­na­tive to UR. To start, I’m going to list the information/goals that UR tries to serve, and we’ll tackle them individually.

I’d like this to be a com­mu­nity process, so feel free to add your ideas, sug­ges­tions, crit­i­cisms, via com­ments or trackbacks.

The cen­tral idea behind this system is that people are bad at pro­vid­ing data. It’s 3:04 p.m., do you know how truth­ful your UR data is?

I should clar­ify, people are noto­ri­ously bad at giving you data, for the sake of giving you data. And they’re really bad at giving you truth­ful data when what they get in return isn’t tied to the data they’re asked to pro­vide.

If I offer you a muffin for your zip­code, why should you give me, a total stranger, your real zip code.

Now, what if I’m offer­ing you a list of great bak­eries with spec­tac­u­lar muffins that are all near your house. In return, give me your zip code… get the idea?

Drumroll….

Here’s the list of prob­lems our “new UR” should try to solve:

While I go and try to find the answers to some of these ques­tions, and maybe a muffin, feel free to write in with other things that we need to know about our users in order to be able to better serve them — then we’ll take stab at trying to find ways to gather them.

Filed under: Business

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Jay Small – May 27, 2004 #

Your “new UR” isn’t far from the real­ity of more advanced reg­is­tra­tion sys­tems already deployed.

My com­pany already tar­gets adver­tis­ing based on expressed inter­ests and related behav­iors on site. As a con­sumer, the more you use our site, the more rel­e­vant the ads should be to you. And we’re not the only ones doing that.

I agree that we, and many others, should do more to match the ques­tions we ask to obvi­ous cus­tomiza­tions of our sites. Again as a con­sumer, if you want cer­tain types of infor­ma­tion sorted cer­tain ways and pre­sented in pri­or­ity over less-​useful types, we should be asking you ques­tions that help us deter­mine how to do that.

And you would then expect to com­plete a reg­is­tra­tion process, even WANT to do it, because the payoff is intu­itive and clear.

So I agree, philo­soph­i­cally, that cur­rent reg­is­tra­tion schemes appear in cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as more a bar­rier, less a moti­vated request for per­son­al­iza­tion. We’re get­ting there, though.