Signing up for freebies like eBooks, whitepapers, checklists, demos, and free trials can feel so good. But this feeling of joy can easily be swept away by the requirement (often useless) to fill in tons of sign up fields to eventually get your freebie. Because, you know, apart from being inconvenient and time-consuming, these might look rude too.

Asking people to provide too much personal information might freak them out and might, of course, feel as an intrusion into their private affairs. Privacy matters!

So, what to do to make your potential users/customers happy about your registration forms? Let’s take a look at a few sign up form best practices below.

Put safety first

People want to be sure you are using their information safely. If you won’t keep their sensitive data secure, they might want to leave you as soon as possible. So, when building your sign up form, consider how a user might feel about it. Usually, they do not understand why you need registration forms, and so everything that’s not clear enough can scare them away.

One good example of a sign up form is Claritymoney’s form. Claritymoney uses an “I am not a robot” checkbox to indicate that the whole process is safe. By checking the box, you now know that other Claritymoney users also have undergone this procedure and that no malware can affect you when you are a user too.

Mint.com also uses a good sign up form. When you press on the “Sign up free” button on its landing page, you can see a lock icon on the button, next to the Call to action. This way Mint uses visual stimulation to indicate that the whole process is safe. As soon as you click the button, you are taken to another page with an “Intuit” sign up form. It’s a combined form for all Intuit products including Mint.

You then have to fill in your email address (note there is no need to fill in a name or a surname), phone number (which is optional), password and then confirm your password and press “Create Account” which again has that nice lock sign on it. In addition, at the bottom of the sign up form, there is a brief notice about all Intuit products and there are also links you can use to read more about “Legal,” “Privacy,” and “Security.”

Explain well

Explaining why you want something from the potential user is another trick to increase the user-friendliness of your sign up form. Because, again, most of the time the users do not know what you need that registration form data for. So, it’s a good idea to provide a few little explanations under the fields.

Github’s user-friendly form lets people know about password format before they fill it in. How many times have you tried a password to then be notified that it does not fit (an uppercase letter or at least one numeral is needed)? To avoid chaos, GitHub provides a tiny tip under the “Create Password” field about the password format.

I am not saying that GitHub is a rockstar in creating sign up forms; however, this little line is the star.

Use few fields in the sign up form

Adopt the “less is more” mindset when it comes to the number of fields in your sign up form. As a rule of thumb, the fewer the number of fields used, the more conversions you will get. Let’s take the example of Ebay.

The sign up form is pretty simple especially if we consider Ebay’s scope as a marketplace. The form does not even require you to create a username. There are no password confirmations either. Take a closer look at the right part of the page: there is this additional info section with slick Help icons. Use it if you need them. At least, you are not overwhelmed with too much information and help.

Show social proof in your sign up form

Nobody wants to be the only person filling your sign up form. Show social proof; provide enough evidence that a lot of people have registered/used your product or service.

At Inapptics, we are showing social proof through providing testimonials of two of our awesome users. Also, we are trying to be extremely helpful; hence the chat box at the right-hand side of the sign up page.

As you can see, for us, a sign up form is something to experiment on. A/B testing sometimes works well too. We always try to make the form stand out by being unique and easy to use.