The process of signing up for a web site has become fairly standard by now: give the site your email address when you register, they send you an email with a link that says something like “Please click on the link below to confirm that you wish to activate this registration.”
Jacob Quist suggests that it’s time to kill this process, and take a simpler approach. In his words:
Here’s my proposed solution (which some sites are already doing):
A better experience is to put the user effort on the edge-cases. Namely, don’t require any action from me if I legitimately signed up. Just send me a nice vanilla welcome email.
In the edge case, where some unauthorized person has signed up using my email, then include some directions at the bottom of the email that instruct me how to deal with the abuse. And an extra benefit: If I have a good experience with your site reporting the abuse, I’ll be more interested to legitimately check out the site.
[Quist.co]
