Designers are known to be dreamers.

It takes a lot of experience for a designer to ground one’s self to the realities of designing a product. It’s easy for an inexperienced designer to overlook these parts of the user experience and get fixated on innovative ideas. When these small user engagements fail because of oversight, they can pile up to bad user experience. That’s not how you gain and maintain your user’s loyalty, which is not good for business. The following things are ones that can possibly improve or hurt your business depending on how they are designed and should always be on a designer’s list of things to consider.

A signup is like a handshake to prospective users. Give a bad impression and a product will have to go through great lengths to win back a previous visitor who lost interest. That’s a lot of marketing budget for an unforeseeable result.

It’s a lot better to keep the form simple. Evaluate the important information needed from the visitor to get things started. Don’t ask for ones that will unnecessarily delay the satisfaction of the customer’s curiosity. It may also help to reassure your visitor, and provide validation feedback one form field at a time. It should feel like a conversation and not an interrogation.

10 SECONDS IS ABOUT THE LIMIT FOR KEEPING THE USER’S ATTENTION FOCUSED ON THE DIALOGUE. FOR LONGER DELAYS, USERS WILL WANT TO PERFORM OTHER TASKS WHILE WAITING FOR THE COMPUTER TO FINISH, SO THEY SHOULD BE GIVEN FEEDBACK INDICATING WHEN THE COMPUTER EXPECTS TO BE DONE. FEEDBACK DURING THE DELAY IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT IF THE RESPONSE TIME IS LIKELY TO BE HIGHLY VARIABLE, SINCE USERS WILL THEN NOT KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT.

—Jakob Nielsen on January 1, 1993

Onboarding newly converted visitors properly is a good way to welcome them. Features that are not readily visible, but add convenience can be pointed out and brought to your new user’s attention at the get-go. This immediately helps to impress them and may even convert them to marketers for the product. Extremely happy customers are always excited to share new discoveries to their friends.

It’s best if you walk them through, or take them on a tour of helpful features. Orient them how to get in touch with support if they run into a hurdle. The goal is to arm them with enough information to make their experience of your product as smooth as possible.

When it comes to paywalls, it is best to use payment gateways that are readily available to the userbase—or the target users. If your user base is mostly from a specific region, consider ones that are available there. Which ones provide the easiest way to top up their balance? Which ones are trusted most? What are the technologies they use for security? Which ones can offer services to regions or countries that are planned for expansion in the following years?

It is also good to be aware of your userbase’s point of view when it comes to money. Some people like to put more value on money over time, some see them equally, and then others see time having more value than money. You have to build your paywall’s experience around this and consider things like security theater to reassure types of users that value money over time. Users that value time over money, on the other hand, will find things like that an annoyance.

Nobody likes being stuck outside of their apartment for a long period because they forgot or lost their key somewhere—especially when they have something important to do inside. Same thing applies for forgotten passwords. Make sure the forgot password and the sign in always works. You never know how much business you’re losing when users can’t get in.

Most of these things should focus on ease and convenience, and can probably be business disruptive if not watched out for. These things are stuff that users disregard most of the time and expect to do so. The thing that should stick and stand out in their memory is a pleasant or enjoyable experience of your core product—not the failures of these interactions.