SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

The registration process should entail simplicity, great usability and a high-level of accessibility. With numerous sites wanting to focus on how attractive and eye-catching their sign-up forms are, they seem to “forget” one principle; how the user interacts with the registration form.

Below we’ve included a showcase of inspiration that solely focuses on one simple yet entirely effective characteristic, enhancing the registration and check out process using steps-left.

Enhancing Your Registration Process

Incorporating steps-left into the registration process has been around for quite some time. Their purpose is mainly to guide and inform the user as to what’s to come in following steps. It’s a clever way to make the process much easier, and in return you’ll yield higher conversion rates. A few years ago there were a number of websites who where already incorporating this method into their sign-up forms.

The only problem with these were that most of them allowed you to choose which step you wanted to complete at your leisure. This meant you could skip in-between steps which caused the user to become confused and discouraged.

As of recent, the ones you’re able to come across don’t allow this type of functionality, but offer more because they “have” less. A few good accessibility tips for implementing steps-left would be to make sure the titles are large enough to read with minimal trouble, if you use graphics and colors make sure they’re not overdone, and try to either use numbers (i.e. step 1, step 2, etc..) or a small image to define the step. You can also strictly use typography as well. As long as the users focus is predominately geared towards the sign-up form, it’ll help the process.

Another feature rarely seen will enable you to ask the users to save their progress at every step, and allow them to come back and finish in case their Internet connection halts, or they wish to complete the process at a later time. However, this would only be feasible for the larger registration processes.

Steps-Left Showcase

Below we have 24 steps-left for you to gain knowledge and inspiration from. You’ll be able to use them as somewhat of a guideline to designing and developing your own.

BlogLines ↓

Amazon ↓

Majestic ↓

Free People ↓

Delicious.com ↓

Food Network ↓

Grasshopper ↓

Sortfolio ↓

Game Co. ↓

Search Inside Video ↓

Flickr ↓

LiveStream ↓

Buffalo Planner ↓

Ikea ↓

Urban Originals ↓

Design Collectors ↓

iWork Wear ↓

MediaLoot ↓

The Ultimate Green Store ↓

PopScreen ↓

John Lewis ↓

Issuu ↓

Mealeo ↓

Hootsuite ↓

Your Turn To Talk

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