Hello friends 👋,

Welcome back to #First1000, the newsletter that analyzes trends from winning (and losing) experiments across the top 100 apps. Today’s topic is sign-up screens.

When it comes to sign-up screens, there is often a tradeoff between functionality and delight. Today, I want to convince you that erring on the side of functionality is the better strategy.

First, let’s take a look at the difference between functional and delightful designs:

• Functional: functional design emphasizes practicality and usability. It ensures that a product performs its intended functions efficiently and effectively.

• Delightful: delightful design goes beyond functionality to create an enjoyable and emotionally engaging user experience. It aims to evoke positive emotions and make a lasting impression.

Now that we understand the difference between functional and delightful designs let’s look at four recent sign-up screen redesigns in which these two extremes were tested against one another. The companies we will be looking at are Ring, Alltrails, Nextdoor, and Spotify.

As you will see, functional (and boring) designs won in each of these experiments.

In the first three experiments, a functional and plain design for the sign-up screen won against enjoyable and emotionally engaging videos.

In the next experiment from Spotify, you will see that even adding an illustration to an otherwise plain and functional sign-up screen is enough to hurt logins and registrations.

I have a few hypotheses as to why functional designs perform better on sign-up screens:

• Distracting users: adding illustrations and background videos to the sign-up screen can distract users from the CTAs, reducing the likelihood of them signing up

• Bandwidth and app size: additional elements like videos, illustrations, and animations can materially increase the app size, reducing the likelihood of users in countries with slower internet successfully downloading your app.

Try boring and functional designs for your next experiment on the sign-up flow
Or take inspiration from prior #First1000 issues on how to further improve sign-up screens:

• Disney+ Winning Message

• Registration Paywalls

• Explain the benefits on the sign-up screen

Until next time,
Ali Abouelatta