It’s great when your requirements as an application designer are subservient to the requirements of your users. A spot oft writ with conflict is user registration…
An approach we’ve been taking lately I call Just In Time Registration or JITR for short. (No, this does not stand for Jesus Is The Reason) When a site “has the JITR’s” (so to speak) it means that you can do a lot of stuff that other, non JITR’d sites, require you to sign-up for. We think this is great. It means that when you visit a site, you can start posting comments after providing ONLY a user name. At some other point in the user flow, say when the user wants to add someone to her network, perhaps a little more is required and requested, like an email or password.
The common practice of requiring an email AND requiring verification of that email before anything useful can happen is lame. Better to ask for the email, grant full access, but then take that access away if the email isn’t verified within a few days.
We think giving users what they want as quickly as possible will make them more loyal.
