What is a Time Account?

Usability Testing: What is the average time a user should spend registering for an online account?

• Specifically, and informed through grounded usability testing research, is there an optimized time that users should have to spend registering for an online account (could be any type of account) that has shown to increase registration conversion, and reduce dropoff?

• Answer:

  I'm curious about your phrasing, "should have to spend." Are you suggesting that if it's too easy for people to register, they won't be invested in the thing they're registering for? That seems unlikely, in my experience. If you're thinking about how much time it takes to register and how likely that amount of time to register is related to converting, you're probably looking at this wrong. The point is to make sure that there's nothing about the design that gets in the way of the person doing what they want with your site or service. They're called "obstacles to purchase." For example, some sites ask users to provide credit card information before allowing the user to try the service out. Many users will drop out in this case. Likewise, in an ecommerce flow, if users can't tell how much the total price is going to be, including shipping and sales taxes for example, they will leave the items in the "cart," and go to a site that *will* tell them this. As for time, time is a proxy for nothing. Measuring how long it takes someone to do something will not help you know whether it is good or bad, works or doesn't work, most of the time. It's not about how much time. It's about what the user *perceives.* If the user feels that each step gets them closer to what they came to your site for, then they will perceive the process to be quick. If you're asking for a lot of information from them that doesn't seem relevant to the user, they're going to feel like the process is slow. You can have quick response time, and only a few steps, but if they're the wrong steps at the wrong time and the user doesn't feel they're getting closer to what they came to the site for, then they will tell you that it was slow and cumbersome. But if there are a few steps and they're the right ones -- or if there are several steps, but they're the right ones -- users will tell you that the process went quickly and it was easy.