Tips for creating a match winning registration form

Nowadays, if you ask a regular Internet user about the date when online forms were initially introduced, the most probable answer will be "a long time ago". Indeed, most of the companies have started using registration forms from the day they’ve moved into online business world. Convincing a user to register on your site is often the starting point for getting a new lead.

And they are not only intended for selling things to your customers There are lots of websites which have registration forms at their disposal and do not necessary expect you to buy something in the first place. Take an example of Google, Wikipedia, Facebook or Ebay. Apart from being the first element of the purchasing funnel, registration forms are often used for getting more information about a new user.

The 2 points highlighted above demonstrate what a big importance a registration form has. But then why so many companies often fail to create a user friendly form and hence lose a lot of customers they could otherwise have had? We think that the reason for that is because these firms are often unaware how an optimized registration form should look like.

An article which you are currently reading is intended to help those businesses design an optimal registration form by listing the most important things they need to firstly consider.

1. Tell your users why they need to be registered

When creating a new form for your website, the very first question you need to ask yourself is why your users need to be registered? Your visitors need to be convinced to put their personal information into your hands. How can you do that? Well, one way of answering this question is to list all the benefits a user would be able to enjoy if he or she decides to fill out the registration form.

Take a registration form on Tinder.com. The webpage list one of the benefits of registering a new account: "Meet new and interesting people nearby". This is a good example of the reason why a person should choose to create an account there.

Take one more example. An official page of Outlook Email Service says that by creating a new account you will "stay on top of what matters and get things done".

2. Don’t use the field if it isn’t necessary

Carefully consider the type of questions you are asking your user to answer. Don’t include the ones which aren’t necessary. By doing so, you will have to collect new customer data elsewhere. But this drawback will be outweighed by the benefit of attracting a new customer which you might have otherwise missed. Collect your customer data via other sources such as social media, feedback forms, personal contacts or by delegating this task to an external market research agency.

Therefore, when designing a new form, try to keep the number of questions at an absolute minimum. You can come back for more later on, when the time is right. This will be a good strategy when looking for customers which are most likely to convert.

In your form, one of the elements which you can potentially get rid of is the "Repeat password" field. Instead of asking a user to enter his/her desired password twice, introduce the "Display Password" option instead. Once your new customer will see what he has typed, the probability of making an error will be drastically reduced.

If you want to have information which isn’t 100% necessary but is a nice customer data to work with, name your labels in the following way. Rather than marking this fields as "required", call them "optional" instead. Those customers who will want to tell you a little bit more about themselves will be more motivated to fill out your optional fields rather than being required to do so.

3. Introduce the "Sign up with your Social Media accounts" option

Nowadays, regular Internet users are using their social media accounts on the regular basis. As of 2017, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn had 1.37 billion, 330 Million and 460 Million users respectively.

Those numbers are huge. They represent a lot of personal data which has already been submitted to the respective websites. Why not take the advantage of this fact and offer your customers a possibility of signing up to your account with their information from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter? The whole process will become much easier and faster. In addition to that, you will get some extra information about your customers’ preferences on those websites. Isn’t it a one fits all solution?

4. Align your labels with the corresponding fields

If you are looking for ways to design a convenient registration form, we would suggest you to pay close attention to how labels are aligned with the corresponding fields. It is a good practice to insert the former right above the corresponding fields rather than arranging them either on the left or right.

5. Provide assistance wherever needed

After designing and installing a registration form, you may come across users who will have difficulties in understanding the type and format of an information they are required to enter. For instance, what type of date you want them to enter as their date of birth? Should it be the American Standard or a European One?

The registration form designed with a user in mind will have no problem assisting customers during their registration process. In addition to explaining your users how you would like them to enter their personal information, try to name a reason why this would be beneficial for both you and them.

6. Don’t use captchas. Use other alternatives

Inserting captchas into your registration form may indicate that your website has a serious spam problem. Captchas are often the main reason why a customer may decide not to register at your website. This is often a frustrating and time-consuming method for identifying whether a user is a real person. Why wouldn’t you use some other alternatives which are more user-friendly? For example:

(a) Text Message Verification. In this situation, you will send a special code which a user will have to enter in one of the form fields.

(b) Math Captcha. In order to verify his or her identity, a user will need to solve a simple math problem. For instance, "what is 3+3"?

(c) Sweet Captcha. This is one of our favorite methods. It is a fun way of verifying users’ identity. Rather than entering either numbers or letters, a user will be required to match categories and drag items to different places.

Using Registration Form for your Magento store

Do you have a registration form installed on your website which runs on Magento? Perhaps there is a need to add more fields on the registration form in order to collect more customer data? Or you just want to change the order of the fields you have there?

These and many other challenges may be easily overcome with the help of Magento 2 Registration Fields Manager extension. Create most informative and user-friendly registration forms and enhance the existing ones with just a few clicks of the mouse!