In my previous post, I talked about how social tools on the web ought to be intuitive, because the adoption process would probably be largely self-driven.

“It just Works”
I hadn’t really noticed how intuitive the installation of programs on the Mac platform have been, nor truly appreciated it, until I recently had to deal with the Windows platform on a new netbook. Then it was back to the days of reading through the instruction manual, all sections of it. Not so much by choice, but more of fear. Fear that something would not work, should I miss a step.

Upgrading my Mac OS platform was not even that much of a hassle. Pop the disc in, and everything pretty much ran by itself. I had so many windows popping up on my (pardon the pun) Windows platform, it wasn’t even funny.

So much for the power of intuition and usability. Here is a link to some light reading about good usability by peterpixel, which has been sitting in my “To Read” folder for far too long! It is web design centric, but I believe the guidelines are useful information for anyone who wants to have a presence on the social web, be it on a webpage, blog or any other platform. Most of what he says is pretty generalizable to other purposes that you might have, and presented in a very digestible form.

Accessibility: Make it easy for us/and them
I’ve noticed that signing up for various social media services on the web has gotten that much easier, and shorter.
At the same time, there is still that issue of having to sign up for an account anywhere before one can proceed, and how much of an annoyance this is. This is so ingrained in us, that I felt really skeptical when Posterous listed their first step as “skipping the signup and account creation.” I felt truly weird, having no account, clicking on the login button and feeling relieved when they had an option to sign up for an account there. So, obviously I didn’t take advantage of the no sign-up needed, possibly because I didn’t exactly trust/believe it. Humans and their habits!

Forrester research tells us that required registration lowers online conversion rates. Their research was based on online shopping sites, so I do wonder about how translatable this would be to other social media platforms. Might be interesting to find out! The effects are probably different, depending on the carrots that are dangling at the other end.

Once again, community comes into play. It is probably much easier, and you will probably have more motivation to sign up for something that your peers are already on, because the crowd can’t be that far wrong…. right?