Hi Vlad,

I just published an article about Account Sign-In Mistakes:
http://www.uie.com/articles/account_design_mistakes/
(Subsequent comments here: http://tinyurl.com/2rzqsu )

My thoughts about your design below:

On Jan 5, 2008, at 11:19 AM, Vlad Fratila wrote:

> I decided I don't want anything from the user at signup. Well, except
> an email, a password and possibly a captcha to skip the email
> validation.

That's good. We've found the less you ask when people they initially  
sign up, the better.

> I want my login form to do signup as well.
>
> When the user presses submit, if the email is not in the db, I tell
> him to enter the captcha and, after a second submit, i present him
> with his dashboard.
> There is of course a use case for users that forgot their account  
> data.
>
> What do you think about this when comparing with the classic login
> form + additional "new account" button? And ... is it viable for
> signups that require additional data (to be presented in the 2nd step,
> with the captcha).

I think this may not be such a good idea. I've seen this done before  
and it hasn't performed well.

What I'm betting you'll find when you conduct user tests (I know,  
user tests are *so* old school) is you'll need a lot of explanation  
to (1) get the users to put an email address into a box without an  
accompanying password and (b) understand that's how they sign up.

Depending what the site is and the benefits of account creation, this  
additional persuasive copy would need to be on top of whatever other  
copy is there to promote account creation in the first place.

Having the traditional two functions takes more real estate, but  
there have been many examples of nicely designed sign-in and account  
creation functions. I suggest you look to them for inspiration.

Hope that helps,

Jared

Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com  Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks


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