Main conference presentation

Re-experiencing information: Dealing with user-submitted data

Lucas Pettinati

Monday April 14 2008, 2:00 - 2:45PM

The wide-spread adoption of web-based services has helped people organize information, connect with loved ones, and share data through an electronic medium. This convenience, however, has spawned a massive proliferation of single-purpose user profiles, closed data repositories, and endless login credentials. Not surprisingly, people are quickly becoming less tolerant of experiences that require large quantities of personal information upfront.Deciding what information to ask a customer when creating an account is a literal balance between user needs and business needs. Users want to protect their privacy and provide as little information as possible. The business, on the other hand, wants to learn who their customer is, and ask as many revealing questions as possible.

In this session, I will draw from my experience in redesigning the Yahoo! registration and account recovery systems. I will also show examples from other web sites, and suggest techniques to apply toward common IA and Interaction Design challenges faced in designing membership frameworks.

This session will discuss the following topics:

• Making registration painless for your customers
• Encouraging accurate and truthful data entry
• Maintaining account information up-to-date
• Keeping the bad guys out but allowing for password recovery