Personally, when it comes to signing up for an online service or community, I’m one for instant gratification. When I actually feel passionate enough to sign up for something, I “want in” immediately. A giant form with tons of fields will likely scare me off or make me re-evaluate my true desire to register.

It seems to be a growing trend online to have a super simple form upfront, and to collect some of that excess information later in the user’s experience. In other words, require solely the information needed to make the account upfront, and let the user fill in the rest later, when they actually feel up to it.

So what are those “necessary” fields that are needed upfront? Well, thats a good question, and I’m not sure anyone has the perfect answer. Is it really crucial to confirm my email? Maybe in some cases. Do they really need my full name? Is a username enough? Depends on the service or community. The answers differ depending on the site, but there are a few really nice registration processes out there that balance these “necessary” fields and provide users with a fairly painless sign up flow.

Vimeo does a really nice job of providing users with an easy registration process. Only three fields are required: your name (which doubles as your username), your email, and a password. This form also exists as an overlay in most cases, allowing users to signup in a seamless process, never leaving the original page they were on when they chose to register.

The validation of an account can also be somewhat painful depending on how a site handles that process, so it’s refreshing to see that some sites are leaning towards auto-validation. Rather than having to wait until after you click “submit” to see if your username is already taken, or if you mistyped your email, some registration flows validate these fields as you type them in. This drastically increases the ease of registration. Everything truly happens in one step, and if sites pair this approach with a simplistic form, the process of signing up for an online account is no longer a daunting task.

Mint and Kontain are two really nice examples of this trend. As you fill out the short and sweet registration form, your entries are automatically validated. Kontain will tell you upfront if your chosen username is already taken, or if the email you entered is valid. Mint one-ups the password field validation by letting you know the strength of you password. A very simple password of all letters may be validated as “OK” while a more complex password made up of letters, numbers and symbols may be validated as “strong”. Since Mint helps you manage your finances and banking accounts, this feedback is an added bonus. Mint, however, asks users to validate both their email and their password. This results in more fields than Kontain, but perhaps helps reduce the number of potential typing errors on a user’s behalf. While I personally find it very refreshing to type a password just once while registering, I’m still undecided if this simplification is really in the user’s best interest.

In the end, some online services simply require more fields than others (such as birthday or age for legal reasons), but either way, I’m still a firm believer in gathering only the necessary information upfront. If a field is “optional”, it’s not really needed for registration and can be collected from users later. Users can be prompted to truly complete their profiles and account information during future visits on any site, but in the beginning they really just want to join and do so without sacrificing more than a few minutes – literally. Simple forms speak to these desires. A quick and easy sign up lets users join and get involved in as little time as possible, while a complex registration process simply gives users more and more time to think about dropping off.