Last week I wrote about a change that we've made to our sign up pipeline for Sampa that caused a dramatic drop in mistakes in a particular field. But I didn't write what the change was exactly, and that got Dave Naffziger (Judy's Book) very curious about it.
First of all, let's be clear this is some of those obvious things, and there is not a "wow" to it, just a "d'oh". Yet, every web application has so many "d'ohs" that fixing each and every one is a challenge.
Second, this is valuable information to Sampa. It's valuable to Sampa's competitors as well and that is why I decided not to say what it was.
After some thought during the weekend I realize this is not a strategic advantage to Sampa, and our competitors probably already know about it, so why not come out and say it?
"Site Name" vs. "Web Address"
You know how GoDaddy calls it "dot-Com name" instead of "domain name"? It makes it so much more down-to-earth for the non-technical folks.
About two months ago, our marketing team redesigned our website. One of the changes was to call the first step on the sign up "Name your site". That sounded very good. It was less techie and more approachable.
Then, we went through a second change to the sign up pipeline to improve the conversion process. This was done by a User Experience consulting group we partnered with. They did a great job at cleaning up and streamlining our sign up process, and they kept the "Site Name" part of it.
As I was deploying the new site, I started to think if this would get people confused at what exactly they were entering on that field. Despite the fact that we have very simple and clear instructions, my gut was telling me some people might not be reading the instructions and getting stuck on that step. So I added a log and start recording every mistake users made, and bam!
Lots of users were entering their full name, name of their companies, title for their site, etc. After looking at the logs it was clear that we needed to change it so I replaced every instance of "Site Name" ("Name your site"), to "Web Address" ("Choose a web address"). Immediately we so a huge drop on the number of mistakes. People were not adding spaces, symbols or invalid characters anymore. Although, a couple of people still make that mistake every day.
More discoveries...
But there was a second learning. Some people, probably the more tech-savvy users, were entering full URLs or full domain names like "http:// mysite.sampasite.com", "johny.sampasite.com" or "johny133.com". So the second fix was to not give users an error message if we could extract a valid subdomain name for that site, stripping all the "http://" or "www" or ".com" at the end.
Takeaways
I know I might sound like a paranoid guy measuring the effectiveness of a single field, but this is a mandatory field on the main conversion pipeline for our product. If 10% of users make a mistake and get stuck, you are getting 10% less conversion. How stupid would it be not to measure it and fix it? No matter how many analytics tools you use, at the end of the day only you know your own product and how to identify and fix the semi-broken pieces of your sign up process.
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
