90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Email verification is often needed as a step in user registration. It plays the role of an identity check – to confirm that the person registering genuinely owns the email address given.

If you run a site that uses email verification in its registration process, here’s a challenge for you: go and find out how many users successfully fill in the registration form but never complete the verification step. If it’s higher than a few percent, you should probably be worried. In fact, whatever the percentage is, you should be thinking hard about how you can bring it down – after all, any leakage is bad leakage.

This isn’t a ‘normal’ conversion rate calculation we’re talking about here. Conversion rates, as they are normally defined, involve comparing the number of users who perform an action against the number of unique visitors (i.e. people who happen to hit the first page). Amongst these unique visitors, a large proportion of them are likely to never actually have been likely to convert (they were lost, having a look, or doing something else), which means you naturally get a large number of drop-outs.

The difference in this scenario is that we can be sure that all of the users were dedicated to completing the task – after all, why else would they have bothered to complete the registration form? They’ve done the hard bit – surely all of them should have completed?

Failure to complete the email verification step is sometimes caused by deliverability issues. However, it’s also entirely possible that the problem lies in your call-to-action design. Here’s an example from KpiLibrary.com (a nice site that happens to have a slightly flawed registration process):

What the user needs at this point is a large, unmissable call-to-action such as “Check your email now“, with no other irrelevant content around it. However, on this page there’s a mixed message – it starts with a green tick icon and and the statement “Sign up successful!…” – but it then goes on to explain that they need to check their email. Users are very likely to skip past the text and start filling in the log-in form, which will inevitably return an error. This is something that Luke Wroblewski refers to as being like “muscle memory”. He goes on to explain (transcribed from a podcast):

“… Time and time again, [...] people try to preface a web form with help text or explanatory paragraphs [...] and every just about single person skips over all that and goes to the first thing that looks like an input field.”

I’ve certainly experienced exactly the same effect myself in many user research sessions in the past. Here’s another example of a weak email verification call-to-action, this time from Mailchimp (which will probably be fixed the time you read this – they are very dedicated to UI design):

Here I am poised to register my email address…

And here I am done. Except I’m not. The text in green – which looks like it’s a positive confirmation – is actually telling me that I must go and check my email.

Like many other usability issues, the problem is incredibly obvious once it’s been pointed out. As Steve Krug puts it:

“If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.”

Here’s how Linkedin does it. A nice example of a clutter free page, stripped down to the core message to ensure the point cannot be missed:

Linkedin also provides OAuth-based verification if your email provider supports it (e.g. gmail), which is probably something we’ll see a lot more of in the future.

Finally, one thing to remember is that email verification doesn’t always need to be a barrier to registration. Just because your competitors do it, doesn’t mean you have to copy them. Facebook, for example, don’t do it – they use a form of lazy registration so people can start using the site before they’re verified.

Here’s a nice antipattern from the Odeon (UK), who show us how to annoy 99.9% of users in an effort to help the 0.1% who enter their email addresses incorrectly.

So, here I am registering on odeon.co.uk…

Oh look, I need to enter my email address twice. Never mind, I’ll simply copy and paste it…







Job done. No, wait, WTF? They’ve disabled paste!





I’ve been a bad user, I must to stand at the blackboard during lunch break and write out my email address over and over again until I promise never to use shortcuts ever again!

Seriously though, typos in email addresses when registering is a real problem (more than typos in passwords, as Jeremy Keith points out – since if your email address is correct you can always reset your password, but not the other way round). However, this problem hasn’t really been solved properly yet – we don’t have a standard design pattern that we can just copy as needed.

UserGlue’s proposal looks promising, but it’s more of a prototype than a finished solution. Have you’ve seen any other attempts to solve this problem in the wild? Have UserGlue hit the nail on the head? I’d love to hear your comments…

This lovely image from a recent Erskine Labs blog post reminded me of the charmingly tragic story of the Sinclair C5.

Spurred on by his immense success in the computing industry with the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX spectrum, Clive Sinclair set his mind to electric vehicles. He drew up the Sinclair C5. Everything looked perfect on paper. The C5 was electric and complemented by pedal power, making it a low pollution vehicle, narrow enough to drive between cars in heavy traffic, like a bicycle.

To cut a long story short, Clive Sinclair woefully overestimated his ability to transfer his successes from the familiar computing industry to the completely unfamiliar electric vehicle industry. His assumptions about market needs were way out, and the practicalities of using a C5 in real life were far removed from the intended experience on the drawing board.

Being low on the road, C5s were hard to see from cars and were dangerous, exposing the rider to unpleasant exhaust fumes. In the UK, rain and wind made them horrible to use in the long winters (not to mention dorky looking!). The C5 had no gears and the seat was not adjustable, making it uncomfortable to use if you were particularly tall or short. The motor turned out to be under-specced, making it too weak to power the rider up many hills without pedal assistance. And instead of a steering wheel or handlebars, steering was controlled by small handles on either side of the driver’s waist, making first time usage awkward and ungainly.

The lesson here is that if Sinclair had conducted field trials prior to launch, most of these problems could probably have been overcome. At the very least, he could have discovered the product was going to be a flop at an early stage, and avoiding the need to haemorrhage vast sums of cash. In 1983, Clive Sinclair raised £12 million to finance Sinclair Vehicles. By 1985, they went into receivership, having only sold 12,000 C5s.

Hold this story close to your heart. Whenever you find yourself getting carried away with an idea in an unfamiliar domain, always ask yourself “Am I doing a C5 here?” After all, it’s easy to find out. A bit of contextual field research will set you straight.

Want to know more? Read the first two chapters of The Sinclair Story by Rodney Doyle (1985).

Using a feedreader and can’t see the video?

This post is all about the importance setting accurate expectations. One of my friends, Ofer Deshe, often uses this clip when running UX training workshops. What a great way of summing it up!

If you lead your consumers to expect one thing but then give them a poorer substitute, they will be disappointed – angry even (but hopefully not machine-gun angry like Michael Douglas in Falling Down). Honesty is the best option. If your credit card application process takes 15 minutes to complete, then just tell them. Don’t say it takes 5. Lets look at a real world example. Geni.com is often cited as providing a great sign-up experience, but the example below example shows it in a different light.

Above you can see a screengrab from a recent geni.com email campaign. “Discover new relatives with Geni hot matches” – sounds pretty cool. Let’s see what happens when you click through.

After you’ve taken the trouble to log-in, you end up on this page. This is pretty tantalising – it’s possible that within a few seconds you’ll see entire new branches of your family tree, perhaps even new lines of ancestry. You’d be foolish not proceed by clicking on one of the “similar profile” links.

What’s this? Most of the information here seems redundant – but hang on, it’s mentioning words like “Pro”, “Special Offer” and “Try for free”. That doesn’t sound good. Let’s see what happens when we click “Try Geni Pro”

A collective scream of frustration “Argh! A credit card form! And it wants almost $100!”. Users are likely to feel manipulated and annoyed. The key point here is that users would have reacted differently if they were presented this information upfront – the problem lies in the order of presentation. With the right sales pitch, it could have come across as a great deal.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg pack a lot of theory about the psychology of persuasion into the concept of a “call-to-action”, but at its simplest, a call-to-action is the area on a page that sums up its main purpose or goal – i.e. the bit that the designer wants the user to read and click on. A good call-to-action is one that’s rapidly noticed and easily comprehended. A bad one… Well, just take a look below. It’s rare to find a site that makes the same fundamental mistake over and over again like this.

Above is a screengrab from theacropolismuseum.gr, the site for the new Acropolis museum in Athens. It opened this year, and it’s turned out to be a very popular tourist attraction. With that in mind, it makes sense to book your tickets in advance. It’s not too hard to find this page (Hours & Ticketing), but the next step is to enter the ticket booking process. So, how do you do that? It’s almost like they’ve hidden the “Buy Tickets” call-to-action on purpose, as a nondescript link right at the bottom of the page. This is the online equivalent of designing a supermarket with the tills hidden in the stockroom – hardly the definition of good business sense.

Having clicked ‘Buy Tickets’, the user ends up here (above), which seems to be the first page of the booking process. The only thing we can see here is a text field. Where’s the rest of the stuff? Where’s the ‘next’ button? Where’s the steps-left indicator? It almost looks broken – as if the page hasn’t loaded properly. In fact, to proceed to the next step the user needs to enter a number into the text field, and then the next chunk of the form will suddenly be revealed. You can almost picture the user muttering to themselves – “Why on earth does this site have to work differently to the rest of the web?”

Having entered the number of tickets, this calendar widget appears (above). Today’s date is currently selected. What are you expected to do now? Once again, there is no clear call-to-action. In fact, you have to click any date in the future and it will reveal which times are available.

Phew! If the user’s got this far, they are probably getting the hang of this unconventional UI. They need to click on their desired timeslot to proceed, then they need to fill in their address, payment details and finally they reach a confirmation page, shown below.

Here’s the confirmation page. The user will expect this to be emailed to them – that’s normal practice, right? Not on this site. If they don’t save or print this page, they are going to have real trouble getting into the museum. This key instruction is written half-way down the page, but once again the designers have made the same mistake of providing a weak, easily missable call-to-action.

To sum up, I’m hoping that this example has given you a reminder about the crucial importance of strong calls-to-action. It’s obvious stuff really, but we all make schoolboy errors from time to time.

Did you know, your Windows 7 launch party can be totally informal? you’re allowed to do the mandated party “Activities” (note ominous capitalisation) in any order you choose! If it were a joke, it’d be funny. This bizarrely clumsy attempt to control and influence consumers reminds me of the issue of The Onion when it was ’sold’ to a Chinese salvage fisheries company: “‘Fish Time has quickly become a staple in my home,’ said mother of five hungry children Jane Roberts, who lives in Iowa, a United State. ‘My babies love Fish Time as much as my older filial relations do. Fish Time is family fun time for all generations of the Roberts lineage.’ And, reports have confirmed, there is more! Many are making Fish Time a must-have meal option in their homes, their workplaces, and their favorite centers of recreation.”

Swap out Yu Wan Mei mandated “Fish Time” with Windows 7 and you’ve pretty much captured the spirit of Microsoft’s marketing strategy. Check out the screen grabs from their screener survey below. It’s nuts!

Gee, I wonder which of these boxes I’m meant to tick in order to get my free copy of Windows 7?

Question 6: would you like to receive junk mail? Er, what are my options?

This is by far the best bit – check out what they want to do to your children. To quote from the second paragraph: “I, on behalf of myself and my children [...] hereby grant [...] an unrestricted, absolute, universal, perpetual, irrevocable, non-royalty bearing, and transferable right and license [...] to use, copy, transmit, distribute, display, modify, perform, present, publish, transform, create works and derivative works, and otherwise promote or utilize my name, image, likeness, voice, words and [...] personal information, and those of my children [...] captured, photographed or otherwise recorded or memorialized in any manner [...] (including, without limitation, print, direct mail, online, mobile or wireless communications, radio or television broadcast, telecast or photograph), for any purpose whatsoever (including, without limitation [...] advertising [...]), and without any consideration or notice to or consent by me or any third party.”

So, how badly do you want a free copy of Windows 7? Badly enough to give Microsoft complete, unrestricted rights to photos and videos of your children so they can use them in their advertising without even notifying you? Seriously?

I cannot imagine why they thought it was a good idea to hide this critical information in the small print. Whatever happened to good, old fashioned up-front honesty?