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I’m so accustomed to lying about personal information when I create online accounts…

How many online accounts does a person need?

After designing what feels like my bagillionth registration form, I have to ask the question, how many online accounts does a person need? More accurately, how many accounts can a person have before maxing out on e-turgor? I’ve got a bad habit of signing up for accounts, poking around and then never letting them see the light of day again. I have more online accounts than a person should be legally allowed, no question. None the less, it all seems worth while when you find that amazing new tool that you, henceforth, couldn’t live without.

Given the phenomenal and ever-growing profusion of application offering online accounts, I had to stop and take a look at the doorway, the registration form.

I came across Christian Watson’s fantastic showcase of this, the banalest of banal web design elements as I was working on this article. There is a much more impressive collection of registration form screen shots over there, than I’ve put together at the end of this article.

In amassing the few screen shots of registration form I put together for this article, one thing stood out as clearly and cleverly bizarre. Most of the forms I was looking at, asked for birth dates! Why? To keep minors out? As a security measure? I’m so accustomed to lying about personal information when I create online accounts (which will undoubtedly be cause for great confusion on my death bed), that this question is just waisted pixels, wasted energy. Someone, please calculate the waste. Does anyone ever tell the truth when asked questions like this? Anyway, just curious.

A Usable Way to Design

The next stop in my quest to understand the registration form, was to head over to the Official U.S. Government Website on Web Usability.

Yes, we actually have one of those. It’s the official fuel station for information about website usability, by the U.S. Government. As one might expect, it’s one of the poorest designed sites out there, for usability. Not to mention, if you take a gander over to the section on online forms as I did, you’ll notice at the bottom of the page, under test results, they kind of muck up the data. Specifically, they muck numbers 5 and 6, ironically labeled Reduce Cognitive Load

On that note, let’s let the forms speak for themselves (and remember, humans don’t think like a database

The Forms

Continue: User Experience and the Registration Form Pt. 2

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 11:58 am and is filed under web design, web application, information architecture, ui design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.