What is your sign up form telling people?

The obligitory “sign up form” is probably one of the most overlooked opportunities in the entire customer experience lifecycle, the red headed step child of touchpoints if you will.

Why? Because it’s probably one of the first points at which the customer is going to “experience” your company, and the experience is generally at best blah and at worst hostile.

Take for instance what you need to fill in if you want to comment, thats right comment on Bob Garfield’s new “open source” Listenomics (which is of course open source because you can comment on it, right?)

Now a sign up form is not only a chance to make a first impression, it’s a negotiation, you have something I might want, and I have some information you might want. As it is a negotiation the value of what you’re offering has to be weighed against the value of my information and the effort that i’m going to put into filling in this form. The problem here, is ad-age uses the same sign up form for everything, and filling in that form might be a valid proposition in some cases. Unfortunately for Bob, the ability to comment on his blog is not enough enticement for me to fill in that form.


Now, the reason I was even inspired to write this post was because I was filling in the cork’d sign up form and it had me laughing out loud, yes it was funny, not only that it set the whole tone for me with regard to the cork’d brand. The experience was such that I “loved” the brand even before i’d finished filling in the sign up form, yes, loved. If a company has a good enough sense of humor to make me laugh during the sign up process then it sure has made a connection with me.

More to the point, why don’t more companies and brands demonstrate a sense of humor?

Anyway, I think that the problems with many sign up forms are exactly the reason that wufoo.com was created.