Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles
"Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that's all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?" Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It's not very useful or inspiring.
Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?
Bellow, we discuss some of our favorite ways it's being done well. We hope you'll share your favorite strategies in comments so we can all learn about more ways to tackle this common problem.
LinkedIn = Boring but Effective
One of the most well known ways to get people to fill out their profiles is the way LinkedIn does it. Users are shown a progress bar and told that their profile is "X% completed." This is probably effective but some people tell us it makes them feel guilty.
It's much better than nothing, but let's look at some more creative and fun solutions.
What's Your Most Common Username Elsewhere?
Personal search engine Lijit does a great job of making it easy to associate your account with them with all kinds of other accounts you own around the web. It's simple: they just ask what your most common username is and then they check for public profiles with that username on a long list of different services. In just moments, with a handful of keystrokes, all kinds of info about you can be gathered together.
It's the first step new users take when they click the button to register on the site. You can exclude certain accounts, add particular usernames for accounts where you use a different one. It's incredibly elegant and a great model that others would do well to emulate.
We suspect that social media ping server Gnip will make this kind of approach all the more powerful and easy for application developers to implement soon.
Once you've got usernames from these services, why not display recent activity feeds on their profile pages? That's kind of how Jive Software's ClearSpace does it (see image on the left) and we think that looks great.
Did You Know...?
Another interesting approach is to offer users information about the activities of other people in aggregate and use this as an opportunity to prompt them to provide more information about themselves.
Social recommendation service (and, disclosure, RWW sponsor) Strands, for example, presents customers of Spanish bank BBVA with messages like the following: "Grocery spending: A married person spends 103% more on groceries than a single person. By the way, are you married or single?" That's interesting to know and would motivate me to answer the question with a click.
How else could this be done? Check out categorized Twitter directory Twellow, where Twitter user bios are categorized by interest and occupation. It's a great way to find like minded Twitter users, but imagine if Twello (or another app) said something like this to users: "We see that you are an accountant - did you know that Twitter users who are accountants tend to post more photos to Flickr than Doctors do, but fewer than people in Defense related fields do? If you'd like to tell us what your Flickr username is, we'll connect it to your Twitter account here."
Maybe it could be done more elegantly than that, but you get the idea.
Similarly, eco-credit card company Brighter Planet tracks your personal ecological impact but starts each user out with the median numbers for people in their geographic area and works backwards.
Messages like the following greet users when they login to their Brighter Planet account: "You live with one other person and you use 15% green electricity. Improve your profile by telling us about the car you drive and your flights."
You Look Like George Bush
Brand spanking new social news site SocialMedian assigns a big picture of a famous (or infamous) person as each new user's avatar. My default profile was graced with a photo of Bill Gates, but other people start out with George Bush - something that must get a lot of new users to click the "change my photo" link. It's a witty idea and we wonder just how far it could be taken.
"You are 15 years old, clean up after circus animals for a living and love Britney Spears videos on TV. (unverified - not true? click here to edit your profile.)" Oh yeah, that could work.
I Heard About You On Twitter
If you've used red hot social lifestreaming app type thing FriendFeed, you've probably wondered why, with everything the service knows about you, there's no place to see bio info about other users on their FriendFeed user pages. Enter Hao Chen's FriendFeed Profile script for Greasemonkey. Every time you visit a the user page on FriendFeed of someone who has associated their Twitter account with their FF account (everyone) - this script grabs their bio info from Twitter and slaps it up on their FriendFeed page. It's fantastic!
Why not let users of your app opt-in to populate their profiles with publicly available profiles from other accounts? (I'm here on FriendFeed by the way, if you'd like me to feed you like a friend.)
Still More Ways to Do It
OpenID accounts usually have some profile info associated with them. Some apps pull that info. The OpenID community is working hard, if slow, on "attribute exchange" - a protocol that would flesh this out all the more.
MyBlogLog is a widely used social network for blog readers where you can find headshots of millions of people, their demographic info, interests and many associated accounts from other social networks. Have you tried out the BlogJuice bookmarklet to see the job titles or your blog's most recent visitors, via LinkedIn? It's SO much fun!
If you don't mind renting users from Facebook, the new Facebook Connect login and profile system looks pretty hot too. For some reason people don't appear to put as much fake info about themselves into Facebook as they do other places - it's a rich source of user profile data and comes with the added comfort of extensive privacy controls. The downside is that putting this much control in the hands of Facebook is pretty creepy.
Conclusion: It Doesn't Have to Be Hard Anymore
There's not a whole lot of excuses any more for asking users of your brand new website to fill in a whole lot of information about themselves. Nor is there for having super anemic user profiles, which leave new users totally uninspired to connect with each other. You need users connecting as quickly as possible in your apps and rich profiles really help.
What other ways have you seen apps solve this problem? We're sure there are many more creative examples and we'd love to find out about them!
The handsome devil at the top of this post is Flickr user thomas pix.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
2 short snappers (CFL on TV):
1) dig the way Wesabe festoons their pages w/avatars; obvious, after the fact, but don't it kinda personalize the space?
2) I thought the way WordPerfect used numerically generated Gravatars was right clever ... anonymous, and yet unique. E.g. (Will this work?)
Poo ... images not allowed. Web1.0 sux.
Had a convo with kevin marks of Google yesterday about this. Perhaps the best way is to get a single ID that travels to each container, rather than forcing users to fill it out --over and over.
Posted by: Jeremiah Owyang
|
August 1, 2008 6:12 PM
yep. i'm reading it right now. excellent tips!
Posted by: ~C4Chaos
|
August 1, 2008 6:20 PM
Thank you for the fun post! I like the idea of settings a random picture, so simple & clever!
Great Post on working towards making Profiles fast and easy! Surely there is need for a killer profile app.
As a Search Engine Blog, we wanted to let you know P.U.B. [Publishers Union of Bloggers] has pending inquires to Widget Providers concerning how they generate their income and what percentage of this income goes to the Blog Publisher making the critical decision to allow a Widget on their site for their readers. In addition we are requesting transparency on the critical issue of how the private statistic from Publishers Blogs are being used, hopefully with the Publisher’s permission!
Will publish these results to keep the community of Blog Publishers informed on this critical component of Widgets on our Blogs.
Sincerely,
Barney Moran
Founder, P.U.B.
Why not build features that use the profile data that is requested? If there isn't an actual use for the data then why request it in the first place. If the value is there and is clearly explained to the user that should be enough.
The info about SocialMedian alone made the article more than worthwhile. Great piece, Marshall... and with any luck, you've just gone a little ways to improving the user profiles of lots of people.
The first site that came to mind when I read this was I'm In Like With You. They make you profile say things like the "15 year old girl" thing you mentioned.
Thanks for the tips and the links as well.
On our social network for francophiles, we made what we now think might have been the mistake of making the generic avatars too cool... People aren't inspired to change them! We should have gone the GeeDubb route. That's brilliant!
www.francophilia.com
check out http://www.iminlikewithyou.com. they have the most playful (and effective) way to get folks to fill out their profiles. they collect your info in little bits & pieces, you won't ever find a long, cumbersome profile form.
Wow, FriendFeed in black looks hot. It's like a black Macbook or iPod.
Too bad the graphics (icons and such) assume a white background.
They should make it a 50$ a year premium feature, just like you overpay for a black Macbook. ;)
Great post. Thanks very much for the Great ideas. Wow
These are some pretty good suggestions. I just wish I could use these to get people to even sign in when they visit. I can tell from my reports that people have been there but no signups or any signs they were there. I would like feedback or something.................
thematrix777
All this pie in the sky amounts to a load of crap. While the exercise of stringing together disparate parts has value in creative process, at the end of the day only a fool would go down this trail.
There's no one magic formula of allied corporations who will make the shuffling of data smooth. Nor would you want them to.
In any event, the problem was solved some years ago when profiles were stored client side in the browser. A keystroke later, forms are autopopulated. Solved.
Spend your energies elsewhere. Or work on increasing adoption of the existing solution. But don't chase the butterflies of "what if I'm at a cybercafe in Tibet" or "borrowing a friends laptop at the park" which don't really exist.
There are two issues that come to mind when its about filling out profiles:
1) the user must WANT to complete the profile (regardless of how "fun" the process is;
2) the user must TRUST the site with the information in the profile.
Its very interesting to see profile complete rates change simply by the fields requested, and where the profile itself is placed in the signup process.
I think these services should start to offer real value to the users and start explaining the reasons and advantages the user can gain by filling the all the profile info. This way users will really start to keep their info updated and on other hand there are many services, which just take out all the info user and users never end getting the real value.
Excellent ways to make users show her faces, the random photo it's just perfect.
This is my first comment, so I want to take the oportunity to congratulates the publishers of this blog.
Saludos from Uruguay :)
thanks for these tips. It's good ideas
WOW what you want is a total Observation.
Welcome to 1984, budy!
Maybe you should read that book...
Why not turn things around? For instance when you're in LinkedIn you fill in your own profile and tell all about the expertise etc you think you have. However, the question is if your connections think likewise about you. Why not have them tell your friends what expertise you have, by allowing them to fill in (part of) your profile?