[gohnjanotis]

patio: great idea about avoiding spam bots.

We recently struggled with this on the design of the front page of an application. A similar issue we ran into is scaring people away with login/password boxes on the front page.

What does everyone think, is it better to have the login/password boxes visible immediately to save the user a click, or do what digg and twitter do to avoid scaring people about a sign-up form in the not so distant future and hide it behind some AJAX?

[patio11]

I think its better to do whatever the A/B test says works better for your particular users.

I burned two hours a week ago trying to test that but my CSS and lightbox implementation did not play well with each other and I eventually scrapped it. I'll take another stab at it in November -- no killing the magic pumpkin before Halloween.

I have compelling evidence that using a lightbox to "pre-sell" the form/download increases conversion rates, at least among my users. Try clicking on the giant image in the middle of my home page -- it works beautifully.