Thoughts on registration schemes
Posted on January 30, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 130 views |
Registration schemes for software are generally a good idea: enter a unique, valid serial number and get to use the software. So why is it that some developers spend so much time working on perfecting their software, software that is of a high-enough quality that I want to pay for it, just to neglect the registration interface?
Here’s two simple things you can do to your registration process to streamline things for the user. If you do these, you’ll never be thanked for it and no one will ever compliment you on it but you’ll make your user’s life just a wee bit simpler:
1. If your registration scheme’s serial numbers are all capital letters (ie: FD5H NT83 9U7Y) please let me enter them as lowercase letters. I know to your hashing algorithm it’s a huge difference, in fact time and time again it’s the difference between registration and non-registration, but to me there’s no difference. Every development language on the planet has some variant of toUpper() in it. Please use it.
Number one is understandable - probably an oversight on the part of the developer who’s used to entering his test cases just so. This second one is definitely a bug but it appears every now and then:
2. If you distribute your serial number separated by hyphens (ie: FD5H-NT83-9U7Y) then permit me to enter it separated by hyphens. I’m tired of registration fields that stop me from entering more characters before I’ve hit the end of the serial number because I shouldn’t include the hyphens. The solution: If you don’t want hyphens then use whatever str_replace() function you feel most comfortable with to remove the hyphens for me. Or stop printing them on your packaging.
It’s the little things that make me feel the love.
I could go on about this, about how I think locking software to specific hardware is evil, or how a 32-digit serial number really is gross overkill and does not make you look like a 1337 coder, but that’s for another day.