Intefy in Kansas City’s Just for Starters Entrepreneurial Competition Today

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Posted July 15th, 2010 in Products, twitter | 1 Comment

We are so excited about an event going on tonight here in Kansas City at the Kauffman Foundation. “Just for Starters” is a forum for aspiring entrepreneurs to share a business idea with a panel of judges, in a timed presentation. Our own Matt Bartlett will present Intefy amidst some stiff competition. According to the event information:

The finalists were selected by KC Roundtable, a local young-entrepreneur group. Four judges – Grant Burcham (Bank President), Sam Meers (Marketing Expert), Grisel Wiley (Angel Investor), and Mark Allen (Successful Entrepreneur) will critique the finalists and ask them challenging questions. At the end of the night, the audience will decide the winner.

We will be hosting the event live and talking about it throughout the night @freshid and using the #starters hashtag. If you want to attend in person, buy a ticket now, or pay at the door. Registration includes attendance, alcoholic drinks and food and it will be a wonderful time!

Find out if Muslim Ranch can beat out the Pocket Shocker; or how a brand new construction company expects to be successful in this economy. See our Intefy product in action and hear what we have planned for it. Is there a KC entrepreneur who will revolutionize collection practices in the US? You must attend to find out the answers to these exciting questions and more!

Thanks to Diana Kander for inviting us to take part in the competition and allowing us to share the event live with our online friends. We’re crossing our fingers Matt brings home the prize, but even if he doesn’t we’re pleased as peaches to be selected as a finalist, and so proud of Matt we can’t even talk about it without sounding like we’re gushing (or like we’re his Mother.) We are so grateful to have him on our team, and will be cheering for him!

Watch the action live at www.twitterface.com/justforstarters starting at 6:00 pm CST tonight, July 15th.

Kristi :-)

UnGeeked Elite!

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Posted April 30th, 2010 in Products, twitter | 1 Comment

ungeeked logoWe at the Fresh ID office are extremely excited for an event coming up on May 13-15 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  The event is called UnGeeked Elite and is a three day conference that highlights social media, marketing and branding forums.  The event has an excellent line-up of speakers including Olivier Blanchard, Chris Brogan, Scott Stratten, Dan Schawbel and others who are all well-known social media, marketing and branding experts.  In addition to gaining great insights from the experts, your ticket and attendance also gets you free copies of books by Chris Brogan, Sally Hogshead, Scott Stratten and Hubspot.  All of the information about the event and speakers can be found at the official UnGeeked Elite event page.

It will definitely be worth the price of admission (and if you register before May 12, you can get a huge discount)!  The event is being sponsored by SOHObiztube, a great online community that helps businesses manage brand message, value and promise.  Check it out at sohobiztube.com.

ungeekedIf you are like us and can’t make it to Milwaukee but still want to attend the event, you can do so by purchasing a virtual event ticket.  Attending this way will give you access to our custom Twitterface page for the event.  You can check out the page here prior to the event. It will be password-protected for registered attendees only once the event starts.

The entire conference will be streamed using Livestream Pro, and, of course, you can always interact with those physically or virtually attending the conference via Twitter while watching the presentations.  If you purchase a ticket for all 3 days, you’ll save… tickets are available for each individual day for $99, and for the entire conference for $199. You can register for the event and purchase your ticket(s) by visiting the UnGeeked Eventbrite page.

For us, this is another little milestone in the life of the Twitterface product, which we will soon be renaming/rebranding to Intefy, by the way. This is our first virtual paid event, and the first time we will be able to have people tweet from the page using Twitter’s more secure oauth mechanism. We’re very excited, and looking forward to testing this process out with CD Vann and the (truly) Ungeeked Elite!

Never More Excited About Twitter!

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Posted April 17th, 2010 in Products, twitter | 0 Comments

Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter said to Chirp attendees (most of whom are application creators or developers), “3 billion requests a day is what you guys make to our server, that’s just api traffic… Twitter is hard to compare to other services because there’s not been anything like Twitter. There’s no other major service that is as distributed, and is really a network, with so many in-and-out points.”

Ev’s entire talk is below, but I want to explain a bit about why I, Kristi, and all of us really at Fresh ID, are more excited about Twitter than ever before. First of all, there’ve been some grumblings and murmerings because Twitter is starting to do things it feels it must, like buy or partner with mobile phone developers to make official Twitter clients for various, oft-used smartphones (such as iPhone, Droid and Blackberry.) If you watch Ev’s talk you’ll see why they’re doing this – there’s an awesome clip of a real user experience of a woman trying to find a Twitter app in the iPhone App Store. It thrills us, as user experience people, that Twitter’s doing this kind of real-world research.

But the reason why we feel excited, despite learning we are going to have to make product architecture changes as every app must use oauth and not store Twitter account data as of June 2010, is because of the number of announcements and steps they have taken that show REAL caring for the Twitter ecosystem and all of the millions of people that make up our Twitter community of users, developers, stakeholders and their own company employees. Twitter aims to grow to hundreds of millions of users, creating significant opportunities for us all. Ev made it clear throughout the week, that Twitter is not looking to take out third-party apps, but they need to do what they must for new and existing users and and rather than rehash their features or worry about what they’re doing, we as developers and marketers and entreprenuers need to step up and use their tools to innovate, not imitate. And they are in the process of giving us MORE tools than ever. http://dev.twitter.com was launched during the conference and they are just beginning to give us api’s for virtually everything they do, and in some cases with less limits and better results (something called user streams.) They’re doing this for themselves and the third-party apps, to enable greater creativity and more exploration of what we can do with the base architecture.

We set up a Twitterface page at the last minute, and you can still see tons of tweets from people who attended the conference and people with questions. I encourage you to check it out and watch Ev’s talk there, or below. There are some more great links below about the content and news that’s come out of Chirp, so you might want to check those out too.

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If I missed any great coverage, please leave it in the comments. We’re excited our dev Joe got to take part in the event… it’s obvious he’s really energized by being with the other smart, creative people at the conference because he’s full of ideas and energy, which is yet another reason we’re more excited about the work we are doing around Twitter than ever!

Bonus Guest/Coverage/Coolness

Will.i.am, of Black Eyed Peas fame, showed up as an unexpected guest at Chirp. Several things were neat about his appearance: first of all, he did a darling interview in which he used the word “dope” a lot and said he had to get into music so he didn’t end up like “these cats” – as he pointed to the overwhelmingly geeky developer audience. (It was funny!) Then he stayed the rest of the day, sitting and learning with everyone else, and apparently spun tunes and tweeted at an after-party as well. Here’s an interview he did with Scobleizer at the conference:

Checkin’ Out Chirp… The Twitterface Way

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Posted April 14th, 2010 in Life Online | 0 Comments

Given the widespread debate and discussion surrounding the apparent conflict between Twitter and third-party developers following the acquisition of Tweetie, today is a very important day for both parties.   Twitter is holding the first official Twitter developer conference, called Chirp, in San Francisco, CA where, hopefully, some questions will be answered.

CaptureAs third-party developers of a twitter-based product, all of us at Fresh ID would have loved to attend the conference, but it just wasn’t a viable option. However, our developer Joe happens to live in California, so we decided to foot the bill to send him to the conference and do a little recon. To make it even more exciting, we decided this would be a great way to use Twitterface for ourselves and others who aren’t able to physically attend. Fortunately, Twitter decided to live stream the entire conference via justin.tv, allowing Kristi to setup an Intefy (new name for Twitterface) page for Chirp at www.twitterface.com/chirp. Thus, we have been able to sit in the office and watch the entire conference (and, of course, get nothing else done).

Having Joe on the ground at the conference has also provided a “non-Twitter official” view of the conference. When the official live stream goes off-air, we are able to switch the feed over to our developer and watch what is going on in between presentations. We also got to watch some interviews with other attendees. During the lunch break, Joe was able to interview Tyson Lundbech (@tysonlundbech) and learn more about ecoVouch, a project he is working on. It’s as if we are actually at the conference.

Though being able to attend the conference virtually is extremely cool and convenient, more important is what we are learning from the conference.  What valuable information have we gleaned from listening to Twitter Execs and fellow developers talk about the history and future of the platform?  Good question.

twttrYes, we are learning a lot about the history of Twitter, including the terrible design of the first home page, and the future of the service, such as improvements that are being made to the system.  However, there is more important information to gain from this conference than how Twitter was created and how it’s being improved.  It’s a little too early in the conference to make conclusions about the future of third-party Twitter development, but a few things have become quite clear.  Based on the first wave of speeches and presentations, it is clear that Twitter wants to be upfront about the challenges that face a company valued at over a $1 Billion. Though many will be sad to see Twitter start acting like the large-scale company it has become, the fact of the matter is that there is business to be done and money to be made.  There is no doubt that Tweetie will not be the last acquisition, as Twitter has to find some way to justify the massive investments that have been made to the company.  This is simply something that developers are going to have to swallow.

In the midst of all the uncertainty, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver), Director of Platform for Twitter, offered a ray of hope for those of us who want to continue customizing Twitter through third-party development.  Sarver, in presenting the future of Twitter and updates to the service, stated multiple times how important third-party development is to Twitter. Sarver said, “We want to learn how to work together as opposed to working against.”  Twitter thrives off third-party development that only extends the reach and capability of the service, and it is clear that Twitter Execs don’t want to see that disappear.

Hopefully, as the conference continues and the after parties kick off, the conversation will revolve around the opportunity in the future for third party developers to continue to work with Twitter and extend the value of the service with innovations and features, rather than continue to focus on the debate over Twitter’s corporate policy.

If you are sitting at work or home and want to catch the rest of the conference, you can do so at the Chirp Twitterface page.  It will be live for the rest of the conference today and tomorrow.

-Matt

Fresh ID to Unveil Custom Chip Foose Tractor Live Online

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Posted March 4th, 2010 in Press, Products, Social Marketing | 0 Comments

The reveal will take place at the 2010 Commodity Classic in Anaheim, CA and shown online live at foose4020liveshow.com

Twitterface-foose4020

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI (March 3, 2010) – For the past 3 months, legendary automotive designer Chip Foose has been working with John Deere to produce a customized 1972 John Deere 4020 tractor. Thousands of people have been following the design and build process online through video “webisodes” made available at the http://deere.com/bigbuck website and on You Tube. Interest in the unveiling has reached a fever pitch, leading John Deere to produce the event live online in partnership with social media agency, Fresh ID. Anyone with an internet connection can watch the big reveal online at http://foose4020liveshow.com this Thursday, March 4th at 1:00 p.m. PST/4:00 p.m. EST.

The tractor is part of the unique Big Buck Customized 4020 Tractor Giveaway that customers can enter to win at their local John Deere dealer through June 30, 2010. John Deere chose Chip Foose to completely customize the tractor in a way that has never been done before to highlight sales incentives that run through April 30th 2010. The tractor will be on display at the John Deere booth throughout the 2010 Commodity Classic in Anaheim, California March 4-6 with online replays of the unveiling available at the http://foose4020liveshow.com website.

Following the unveiling, the tractor will tour the country as part of the John Deere Drive Green Tractor Experience where rural property owners, agricultural producers and other interested consumers can take advantage of the opportunity to operate and ask questions about the latest models of utility tractors and other equipment available from John Deere. The tractor, along with three gator utility vehicles, will be given away as part of the promotion. Rules for the giveaway as well as a complete schedule of Drive Green events can be found at http://deere.com/drivegreen.

About:
John Deere (Deere & Company — NYSE: DE) is a world leader in providing advanced products and services for agriculture, forestry, construction, lawn and turf care, landscaping and irrigation. John Deere also provides financial services worldwide and manufactures and markets engines used in heavy equipment. Since it was founded in 1837, the company has extended its heritage of integrity, quality, commitment and innovation around the globe.

Chip Foose is an internationally recognized automotive designer and fabricator best known for his work on custom hot rods. He starred in five seasons of Overhaulin’ on TLC. Foose’s unique style has earned him numerous industry awards, including the Ridler Award and Best of Show at SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association), as well as recognition in the Hot Rod Hall of Fame. Foose owns and operates a custom shop in Huntington Beach, California.

Fresh ID, LLC helps businesses around the world expand their business and reach their goals. By understanding companies from the inside out, Fresh ID designs intelligent solutions and products that help clients do business and engage with prospects and customers. Brand identity and monitoring, social media consultation and campaigns, web design, site socialization, interactive design, application development and user experience strategy are a few of the services offered by Fresh ID. More information about the company and the Twitterface application is available athttp://freshid.com and at http://twitterface.com.

Live Nude Events… Behind the Scenes of Like Minds 2010′s Online Event

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Posted February 28th, 2010 in Product Launch, Products, Social Marketing | 5 Comments

We had an interesting Thursday/Friday last week. For those who don’t know, our product Twitterface has come out of beta and is now a paid product. Pricing is still being finalized. We have a new feature that allows video on the page, as you can see by clicking the image, and the Like Minds conference held Friday in Exeter, UK was kind enough to partner with us on our first ever debut of this offering, to show their event live online while it happened in Exeter.

Twitterface-likemindsWhat we learned, was more than we bargained for. Things blew up. We had to make adjustments, there were issues and confusion. And of course, all of it happened in front of everyone watching… talk about exposing yourself! It’s a bit nerve-wracking to do these experiments in the social space where things could go horribly wrong and people may jump all over you about it. But it gave us so much real experience, and mostly worked well, so I am thankful we are offering this now. I wanted to recap what was going on behind the scenes of this fantastic conference and tell you what we’re doing to make these events better in the future.

The Twitterface page for Like Minds had the aim of using an assortment of services, and whenever you combine technologies, mayhem often ensues before you get it totally right. Our goals were:

  • Live Streaming of the Conference
  • Watching Real-Time Conference Conversations
  • Tweeting from the Page
  • Links to Conference Information
  • Delivering Live Blog Feeds
  • Providing an Online Experience that Extended the Live Experience

Live Streaming

Our partner and developer Joe Taylor did an amazing job of coding the video feature for Twitterface pages so that it’s easy for someone to embed a video on the page. It is super-easy to use the embed code from Ustream, YouTube or anywhere you have embed code offered and put it on the video page. It’s not as flexible as it hopefully will be in the future though – the pane that shows up beneath the video, does not automatically adjust to fit the video width, so we need to work on that. However, we can adjust that pane width after the chosen video (or service you will use) is added, to make the page look more polished. So that’s a minor inconvenience for now. Overall, I was thrilled with how adding a video and changing video codes work.

Watching Real-Time Conversations

A lot of people like to read and watch conversations without joining in, or they like to hop in and participate. We wanted this to be easy and so we added an auto-refreshing of the panes feature to Twitterface a few weeks ago. In reality, something we did not anticipate was our product producing api overage errors. We are going to have to work with Twitter to see what we can do about that. When an unknown number of people are hitting the page, and panes are refreshing every 20 seconds (or longer) it caused our limits to be hit quickly. I didn’t really know we had limits, as Twitterface is a whitelisted product, so to see this happen as the conference opened, at 4 am our time (Joe and I were up to make sure all went smoothly) nearly caused us a heart attack. What was frustrating is that we had tested this on Twitter the night before and this never happened – of course, there weren’t as many people hitting the page. Doh! We figured out that having a profile name up, instead of searches, would give tweets and not api errors so everytime we saw the api errors happening, we switched to a profile name. We’d like to thank @thebrandbuilder and @adders for being such great live tweeters as they saved our necks because we put their profiles on and still had some coverage.

Tweeting from the Page

Our product has its own login (it does not use oauth) and is meant for one person to use, like your Twitter account on the web works. But we wanted people to be able to send tweets from this page without having to leave it, and we wanted it to be secure as possible and use Twitter’s oauth mechanism. So hooking that up, in conjunction with our tool being architected like it is, was a hurdle we had to get over. With the help of our developer Tom Jenkins, who now has a dayjob but graciously did work for us in his spare time on this, we managed to get a working oauth widget on the page, and though it had a few display bugs (the page had to be refreshed if the widget box didn’t work right) it worked and you could tweet from the page.

Links to Conference Information

One of the initial features of Twitterface was links to real sites in the footer, to make navigating to other places easy. The conference organizers added their schedule, a link to ways to participate, a link to add photos to a Flickr pool and links to their sites at the bottom of the page, and we used that Schedule link constantly to adjust the page settings… we put the speaker’s name beneath the video as they were about to speak and changed that pane when they went to lunch to keep people in the loop about what was going on in Exeter.

Delivering Live Blog Feeds

Like Minds had two official live bloggers using a service called CoveritLive to do real-time coverage of the day. Our dream was to drive these feeds, since they had an RSS feed, into the page but we needed a way to do it. The awesome @dlvrit service saw my pleas for help on Twitter and gave us the PERFECT solution. I was so happy. Unfortunately, you can’t test CoveritLive without them going live, so what we did not know was that our solution was not going to work. Until we were Live and in front of thousands of people, of course. The RSS feed produced only some sort of timestamp, not actual coverage, so later in the day we discovered @adders was blogging live, and tweeting also about his live posts, and so we switched to his tweets and it helped so much. We love http://dlvr.it and will work with them in the future on live event feeds though – they supported us above and beyond what we anticipated and their tool is excellent.

Providing an Online Experience

Despite all the technical problems and glitches, one thing we seemed to actually deliver on was providing a great online experience for virtual attendees. This is important, because Like Minds and we at Fresh ID want to come up with ways to do paid attendance to certain events in the future. So a good experience is very key to this working at all. Throughout the day, attendees watching the Twitterface page seemed to have good things to say about it – like they felt like they were in Exeter, that they loved watching it online, that it was so good to be able to watch it live they felt they could cry. In reality, you can go to Ustream and watch a live event. And of course you can set up hashtags and things in your own Twitter client and keep an eye on things that way. But what we wanted to create was an extension of the Live Event, and that means branding. That means attention to detail, and focused conversations, and cutting out the noise. So I think what worked for people, and the reason we’ve created the product, is that they were attending a branded experience online, because they couldn’t be at the real event in person, and they felt the connection because it was planned, branded and constantly monitored to ensure a smooth experience and really, the best one we could give them despite technical issues that gave the Fresh ID team headaches all day long.

So, the net result of the day was pretty positive, both at the event, and on Twitter from what we could tell. Here are some things we’ve learned, that will affect our product offering and future events:

  • Events must be monitored every single minute, by someone. I got up at 4 am because in the UK they were going to start around 10 am. Joe had stayed up – it was 2 am his time in California, and thank goodness we did get up/stay up because the api limit issue would have made this page unusable had we not started making changes to refresh times and adjusting pane settings to not display the error when it happened. The opening of Like Minds was smooth and fun there it seemed, but it was a nightmare for us and drove home the continual monitoring issue, which we had not planned for. I’d had two hours sleep because of getting the page finished Thursday night, so though I didn’t plan to stay up, it wasn’t optional. My team was also not around – Joe eventually went to bed and Lisa and Matt were en route to meetings and the office. So during their lunch, I got ready very quickly and drove to my office to continue monitoring until Matt got there, and then he took over the rest of the day. We will be offering this as a service to companies who need it, but people who do not hire us to do this DEFINITELY need to plan to have a person attending the page and making constant adjustments to keep things flowing.
  • One of the things Like Minds did to us was use video from two different ustream channels, which I sort of figured out on my own. LOL! We did not have a member of their web team on a phone speed dial or even Twitter.  I mostly worked with Scott Gould to set this up, one of the founders and event organizers, and I didn’t want to bother him because I knew he was busy at the event. Fortunately, I happened to notice he had streamed from both a LikeMinds and a ScottGould ustream channel, so if one went off-air we checked the other to make sure we weren’t missing something. But we needed communication with a member of the tech team there – it would have helped us know what was going on and when they were going to stream or not stream.
  • We have to talk to Twitter directly about these api issues, and we’ve never worked with them directly. Fortunately for me, I am making that Lisa’s job. Haha! I hope we can get that improved, but if not, we know how to get around it during an event.
  • The official hashtag for Like Minds is @wearelikeminds, but no one tweeted from it all day and we needed it when we had to switch from a search to profile views only because of api issues. I really recommend that you assign someone to tweet from the official account – even if you have to ask a participant to do it and hand over the login temporarily. For people wondering what is going on, that would make a big difference and it would have solved some of our problems doing this live offering also.
  • The presentations could not be viewed behind the presenter, but with some adjustments they could have been. We are going to design a combo video/slideshare page I think, but it would have been very nice if the presentation had been dropped down behind the presenter (almost even with his feet) so online viewers could see the slides and hear the person talk at the same time – in fact, that would totally rock!
  • Organizing the remote event team, with the team on the ground, for fast communication via skype or twitter makes sense. We will make sure to do this in the future. I actually think it helps for the remote monitoring team NOT to be at the event, to minimize distractions. It is too easy to have to put out fires at the event and lose track of monitoring this page – for us, our sole job was to watch the page, fix issues and keep things flowing online, and we were not hit up with other issues that took focus off of that task by being in the building where it was happening.
  • When Like Minds broke for lunch, there was no Ustream feed for at least an hour and a half. I think we lost some online viewers then. I know that in the future Scott wants to enable video at the lunchtime talk sessions – that would have helped, or even having an event take place on stage (maybe one of the lunches is done there) would have helped not break the momentum of online viewing. I loved the lunch idea though – they had numerous mini-sessions over lunch at different restaurants around the city! Such a cool idea. Attendees got to choose the type of food, speaker and type of conversation they wanted to have.
  • One of the things I noticed, was that this conference WAS very pleasant to attend online. When I got up at 4 am I was still in bed. So here I was in my jammies, comfortably propped up on pillows in the dark, while everyone in England was looking dapper and had makeup on and their hair done. Yet I was learning the same cool information they were – it was REALLY pleasant! And watching the tweets from people actually there, plus being able to tweet without leaving the page was very nice. This is an experience I would want to repeat at tons of other events… not just conferences, but musical events or education of some type – it really did work like I envisioned it, aside from our little issues (which we will find a way to make better!)

We were very pleased with the analytics behind spreading the word about the event Twitterface page. One thing we did at the 11th hour was a press release, informing folks that this would be a live event online. We definitely want to do that earlier than midnight before the event, next time. LOL! Because that press release was picked up by numerous sources – Lisa has the exact count. We’ve had over half a million potential tweet impressions of the twitterface.com/likeminds2010 link, and 75o of the aggregated bit.ly link for that url, and it was mentioned online in blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook in more conversations that I don’t have a number count for. We had over 660 people watching the page it seems, from Google Analytics. That number is important, because only 300 people or so could attend the actual event in Exeter before it was sold out (and it was sold out.) So they increased attendance twice over in online attendees – pretty cool!!

I want to thank all of the people on Twitter who helped us test this page with a live ustream video of race cars in the wee hours Thursday night. I wish I could give you all a present – you helped us so much and we’re very grateful you took the time to test the tweeting and video watching for us.

We have had many inquiries about doing this for other events, including SXSW which is coming up soon. Contact us and let’s talk about hooking this up for your event! We’d love to keep experimenting with what we’re doing and perfect the kinks in the process.

In the coming days we’ll be hearing from someone who attended the event virtually (@brandguardian is writing a blog post) and I am eager to hear what others thought, so if you watched our Twitterface page during the event Friday and want to share your experience, please let us know in the comments!

The Art of the Signup

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Posted November 2nd, 2008 in Design Projects, User Experience | 14 Comments

There is no single best way to have users sign up for an account online, because there are too many variables to be considered for this aspect of the user experience. Varying factors can include security, purpose of the account, understanding of the user at the time of signup, what information they must have ready and what they will have to do next, among other things. So to point to a cool new site – even a competitor’s – and say “I want a one-field signup process like that!” does not necessarily serve your needs or your user’s. In fact, there is an awesome site I recommend to people that suffers greatly from a confusing signup process because they tried to simplify it too much.

I have been thinking about this a lot, because we’re examining the VisualCV signup process (I do consulting for them) plus I needed to develop a process for a product my partner and I are about to release called Twitterface.
 
Twitterface is an alternate Twitter interface that is browser-based. It offers distinctions like multiple accounts, and a modified brand experience, and so the potential for pain is moderate, but not too severe for Twitter users. Since the software can’t be used without a Twitter account, the vast majority of our audience should find our settings and design options familiar, and will likely want to move quickly into the site so they can see if this is a product they want to add to their Twitter toolkit or not. Here are step-by-step prototypes of the signup process for Twitterface: 
 
Step 1: Signup from the Home Page
One of the first problems I ran into is that users will need a Twitterface account, which is separate from their Twitter account (although they could use the same name/password if they choose.) This is because we will have settings we keep track of for people so their account is easy & pleasant to use. I am hoping this signup form makes that clear by specifying the words “Twitterface URL” but user testing will have to be conducted to make sure.

 
Step 2: Add Primary Twitter Account
Now the user needs to add a Twitter account that will be considered (by us) their primary account, for the purpose of setting up a personal account on their Twitterface page & responding to search tweets. Users will be able to add multiple accounts here before moving on, or they can start with one.

 
Step 3: Select Twitterface Options
The user is asked to select the number of accounts to show on one web page, and their level of security for logging in and out.

Step 4: Choose the Page Design
A default Twitterface theme is selected, but the user can either change it or design their own interface, including background, logo, colors and icons. Because that sounds like a lot to do in the signup process, I made it easy by telling users they can come back and do this later.

Signup Done!  User Sees New Twitterface Page
A four-step process may seem like a lot to do before arriving at the point of the product, but I feel it is the smoothest way to enter the user into our system. An alternative would be to let them signup and dump them straight into their Twitterface page, where they would need to figure out how to go down to the settings and make all the changes we just had them set up in a few steps. That idea didn’t feel very pleasant to me, despite the appeal of getting a user in front of the product immediately.
 
After we have a working prototype of the product online, I will do user testing and ensure this is as smooth as I want it to be, and the design may be adjusted. It is an art to guide users through complex or unfamiliar steps while employing the restraint to have them do enough to get started and begin learning the software, but not too much. I hope I struck the right balance with this design.
 
If you’re an application designer, think about your user’s first few minutes. Could you take them through a guided flow so that they ultimately arrive at the product with some understanding of the different components? If not, what would it take to provide this kind of path? If you look at the prototype screens carefully, you’ll see a lot of guided text on the sides of the page, and buttons that indicate next behavior (they don’t just say “next” or exist on the page if they aren’t needed yet. I also included “hints” about how to swiftly complete the step and keep moving in some cases (see the light blue “psst…” text.) This extra programming effort usually results in a significantly more simple experience for users in the interface. It’s well worth it!

Getting people to signup is a marketing and conversion issue not covered in this article, but the signup experience itself is your user’s first impression of using the product for their own benefit. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this design and see other great examples of signup processes. Link me up! :-)