Slowly.
Update: I received an email from The Australian’s editor Chris Mitchell explaining that sign-ups in the first 8 days had met their expectations (and to be fair, the numbers he shared were pretty good). He admitted the flow was cumbersome but reiterated how engaged users were with the paper across all platforms.
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The Australian is Australia’s biggest-selling national newspaper, the first to introduce an iPad App and now it’s the first to introduce a paywall. On those measures, it’s at the bleeding edge of news innovation in Australia, or at least it should be.
I want The Australian to succeed. I grew up reading it on weekends.
I want the paywall to work. Good journalism has high value. $2.95/week is a smart starting point to try and experiment with delivering value to paying news customers across multiple platforms.
Recently, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with smh.com.au and though I love the news.com.au redesign, I don’t find enough good stuff there to keep coming back. (This isn’t a judgment call on the content, it’s a fact. I always forget to go back). So I am ready for a better alternative. And I am ready for The Australian to be that alternative.
I decided today to switch, to add The Australian to my bookmarks toolbar tab and make it my daily Australian news source.
I’d forgotten about the paywall, but fortunately, there’s a clear offer – a free trial for three months. The offer’s nicely designed, clearly communicated and there’s a big red shiny sign-up button. Perfect. I’m in.
Here’s What Should Happen
You enter your email address, hit Try It Now and you’re in.
There’s an email confirmation sent to your inbox. You click on the link in the email, you have a single screen to create a password and agree to Ts&Cs and your account is created. A month later you get an email explaining the different upgrade options and then some final opportunities to upgrade before your 3 months expires. That’s an easy solution based on some plain, current web standards.
But Here’s What Actually Happens
You click Try It Now.
You’re taken to a landing page.
With a lot of different value propositions.
And an array of unnecessary images. Keep in mind, that by clicking on Try It Now I’ve already qualified myself as wanting to Try It Now, so this screen is already baffling enough. Would anyone use the following image to convince themselves of Trying It Now, having already clicked Try It Now?
Then you click Try It Now for the second time, and you’re taken to a generic log-in page.
In terms of hierarchy, we now have a new range of options.
So you Create An Account, which requires 10 fields and 2 drop down menus.
Why re-type password and email address?
Why would you need a security question for this kind of account? It’s news, not sensitive details.
If you type a short password, be warned – you will see this pop-up. Note that “Password must not include the string news”.
So after double entry of email and password, a security question and an 8+ character password, there’s a security check.
And then, to load all this information, there’s 10+ seconds of processing time.
At which point, you’re taken to a Billing Details page with 5 more fields and two more drop downs. Keep in mind, at no point have we entered credit card details, it’s a Free Trial after all. So the Billing Details at this point seem like overkill.
Then to finish, we have been opted-in to receive marketing messages. And there’s a Ts&Cs document to agree to. But, we’re not done yet. There’s still a text-heavy confirmation page to navigate.
But remember, we started this journey trying to read an article. So we have to manually click back to get to that article again, or, go to the home page and find it again. But we’re not done, because there’s still an email in the inbox to come. Not signed by an editor, or even a real person. Just: ‘Customer Service Team’.
I also now have a Subscriber ID (where did this come from?) an a Subscriber Name (terrific).
If You’re Still Reading…
…and chances are that you have given up by now, you have to wonder how many people have clicked Try It Now only to give up frustrated minutes later.
Something that could be one field, one click and an email confirmation, somehow ends up taking 8 screens, 15 fields, 9 clicks and 3 drop down menus.
The future of real news is going to be hard enough to sustain. It’d be a shame to add digital incompetence as another barrier.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Whilst I agree completely with the meat of this article, I don’t think you’d be able to do it with one field. Surely it would be very easy to game the system if all that was required was an email address and confirmation? You can set one of those up in minutes, and if it gets you 3 months free access, then you only need four email addresses to get an entire year free – unless they’re storing IP data, which is hardly a good way to filter specific users.
Hey Steve,
Having a sign in with unverified details doesn’t solve that problem either. You say it’s easy to get a fake email address and I say it’s pretty easy to fake all those other details too.
The way to do with just an email address is like this:
1. User submits email address and click’s the submit button.
2. User is informed that they will be sent a validation email.
3. Validation email arrives with a username (email addy) and password (randomly generated) and a URL associated with the newly created account.
4. Client clicks on URL and they are off to the races for 30 days. At this point they can’t update their details, change their password and buy any of the other offers.
@ Steve – Fair point. I just don’t think you build the experience to keep people doing that out. You build it to bring people like me, who want to be in, in. The flow I outlined is copied from lots of places, it’s not impossible to achieve both.
@David – That’d work.
I agree with most of the points above, however I like to enter my password twice, and my email. Mostly because I sometimes spell the password wrong.. How else would you know?
The main thing is that they could have offered optional data entry to get users to sign up.
Offer #1: Enter your email and try it 1 month for free.
Offer #1.1: In the next screen “get an additional 2 months if you fill in these details”
Would be good to run some A/B testing on the number of users signing up via short cut and the number of users willing to give more data for more trial time. And then in 4 months it would be great to see how many can be retained.
(Oh and speaking about usability: The twitter username fiels underneath the submit button should be next to the other fields on top and have the same styling!)
Anyway, nice post!
Signing up for the free trial is pretty cumbersome, and it’s clearly a way to get people signed up for free… then taking their money after they’ve forgotten about it 3 months down the track.
That said, after the initial headache of signing up, the site is much nicer and easier to use.
I reckon I’ll get my $4.50′s (I signed up for online + Saturday paper) worth.
Yeah Nick you can bypass this whole paywall bullshit by simply copy-pasting the article’s headline into Google and clicking that link. Non-subscribers can then read the ‘news’ articles in full without fear of actually giving Murdoch money.
Try it, it works.