Last.fm's signup page is one of the best I've ever seen. It's elegant, user-friendly, and does a fantastic job of keeping the user aware of what's going on. Rather than splitting the signup process into several steps across multiple pages or combining them all into one massive form, it splits it into three steps but keeps everything on one page. As you go through the signup process the steps you've completed become greyed out. It also uses just the right amount of AJAX to aid in the signup process. Kudos to the designers/developers that put this together. It'd be interesting to see if this process would work for an e-commerce checkout page.
As far as Last.fm's actual service goes, I've just gotten started with it so I can't vouch for how good it is. It did win first place in the music section of our Web 2.0 Awards, however.
Excellent idea. I am sure we'll see this tactic being used on many sites. I'd surely test it on our ecommerce sites.
It's too bad I don't have a check out on my blog. :-)
Maybe I should. I will charge per each highly valuable word and maybe for every comment. We'll see.
It seems the page has been changed?
I'd just revisited this blog entry as I wanted to mention it in another post about AJAX checkouts, but now the signup page seems to have lost its 3 column layout and its AJAX.
I guess they must have been having problems. Shame, as it was really neat.
Last.fm is amazing! I've been using the service since the beta days of iScrobbler. It was the best way to keep track of what music your friends are playing. Now, Last.fm is even more feature-rich. Charts, forums, blogs, radio, etc. Everything is done in style! There is even an iPhone app that 'scrobbles' the songs on your phone. They also have a fantastic recommendation engine for their radio, far surpassing the Pandora Project! I remember that Last.fm was one of the first to have a sleek presentation of a Tag Cloud when they were first emerging...Everything they do is so stylish and beautiful, you can even change the theme from 'Simply Red' to 'Paint it Black' with ease!At the time of their redesign, Last.fm and Facebook were the best products of Web 2.0 to come out of all the hype!
I've been using last.fm's music player for the past 24 hours and I'm really impressed. I'm finding a bunch of new music that is very in-line with my taste. I even stuck a little "currently playing' list on my seomoz profile.
The developer needs shooting! I'd make any of my staff do it again.
Wow, your right oatmeal. I bet that page is very effective at conversions.
Its cute-- and so long as you are only using a 3 step process I am sure it works fine...
This is now my de facto example to 2.0 sign-up. Love it. I've already pulled shots of it into a presentation. Thanks for the mention!
The interesting thing to me is that they actually stretched out the process. They could have easily combined steps 2 and 3 or just used the same functionality without the guided columns ...but I think it works. Ideally they would be testing these variations for conversion.
The love the non-registered user homepage as well. Radically simple. These guys get it.
Just signed up, scared to what it'll archive and say about me. ;)