My company is about to launch a service whereby patients can send
health-related messages to their physician.  Some are arguing that
users should not be required to register, arguing that it would reduce
unnecessarily the utilization of the service.  I have argued that the
benefits of registration greatly outweigh whatever minimal burden
registration represents.  However, I need to be able to have evidence
that requiring registration for this level of service (personal
communication kinds of services) does not significantly reduce
utilization.  So my question is: "Where can I find good statistics on
the effect of requiring registration on site utilization?"

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Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 20 Sep 2003 14:33 PDT

After reading your comment, I believe that the service you are trying
to provide is not really comparable to your average site (say an
e-magazine) that requires registration in order to subscribe. If you
were to operate a drop-in clinic, would your your client base be
smaller if they knew they had to provide some basic information?
Considering that doctor-patient confidentiality exists (I assume in
the service you want to provide this is the case as well) I believe
that the large majority would not mind.

Stats for something as specialized as this are hard to come by, and
some cursory digging has returned an empty result. Perhaps a way to
show the validity of registration is to come up with a set of reasons
why people generally don't register on a site (in general) and then
show why these reasons don't apply to your situation. If you would
like me to take that approach I can certainly do this for you :)

answerguru-ga

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Clarification of Question by philscv-ga on 20 Sep 2003 14:49 PDT

Per the clarification request, data / statistics from a defensible
source that show the primary reasons why people don't register on a
site would help me to answer the questions at hand.  To be most
helpful, this data would show why people don't register for general
online sites, and these reasons would not apply for a specialized
communication site.  Even more helpful would be data that shows how
the attitudes of users who are interacting with a trusted site for a
specialized service are distinctly different than the casual web user.
Thanks for your help.

---

Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 21 Sep 2003 07:48 PDT

Hvaen't had very much luck - perhaps another researcher will be able
to find something for you...

answerguru-ga

<Websites that are trusted by their users do not appear to have
problems in getting users to register.

The NY Times requires users to fill out a four page question form.
Despite this lengthy procedure they have 10.8 million registered
users. ESPN.com introduced a 6 question registration form and
recruited 548,000 users in two days.
http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/1588571

The first page encountered on the Tesco website is a registration
page. Despite this requirement the site has over 450,000 registered
users.
http://www.tesco.com/Register/default.htm?from=/superstore/Default.asp
http://www.interwoven.com/news/press/2000/0727tescopr.html

Statistics.
The survey carried out by the Personalization Consortium is probably
closest to your needs. This shows that users actually prefer
interacting with a site that remembers information about them and
dislike having to re-enter information already given on a previous
visit.

Summary of the results.
4500 website users were surveyed.
15 percent were unwilling to divulge personal information to web
marketers. 51 % would share information for a better service and 33%
had no opinion.
73 percent of consumers prefer that a website remembers information.
From these 62 percent dislike having to enter personal information
they had provided on a previous visit.
58 percent require a privacy statement on a site before giving
information.
51 percent always read the privacy statement before parting with
information.

The type of information that people would be prepared to divulge
varies. The percentage of people willing to give the following
information.
Name – 96%
Email address – 95%
Address – 81%
Hobbies and interests – 76%
http://www.personalization.org/WebConsumerSurveyRelease1.doc

http://www.patricerutledge.com/Art_pers.htm

A 2001 survey conducted by Cyber Dialogue found that 87 percent of
people are annoyed at being asked for the same information more than
once. 82 percent are willing to provide such personal information as
gender, age and ethnicity if the site will remember preferences and
personal information.
It is clearly important to explain your privacy policy and how any
information given will be used as 82 percent of those surveyed have
refused to provide information at a website because they were not sure
how that information would be used.

It was found that a greater amount of personal information would be
given in exchange for access to restricted areas of a site like a
members’ only area or a secure environment.
http://www.personalization.org/pr050901.html

Reasons for not registering.
GVU has carried out a survey on the reasons for not registering with a
site.
The top three reasons are the terms, it not being worth the risk and
not trusting the site.
Do not register due to:
Terms –75%
Not worth risk – 73%
Don’t trust 67%

Making a registration process fast is important. The GVU survey found
that 48 percent of respondents said that the time taken to fill in a
form was the reason for not registering on a site.
Full details of the surveys can be found at:

The tenth survey
http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1998-10/graphs/privacy/q48.htm

The eighth survey
The main reason (66%) is that the user does not know how the
information will be used. Second was it not being worthwhile to access
the site (63%) and third that the user did not trust the site
collecting the data (58%). The survey also gives details about which
pieces of information people don’t like giving.
http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1997-10/graphs/privacy/Reasons_for_Not_Registering.html
The seventh survey
http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1997-04/graphs/privacy/Reasons_for_Not_Registering.html
The sixth survey
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-10-1996/graphs/privacy/Terms_And_Conditions_For_Revealing_Information.html


DallasNew.com found that less than 0.2 percent of visitors would not
return due to registration.
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:gYRCZd1W7lAJ:www.digitaledge.org/DigArtPage.cfm%3FAID%3D4822+%22+visitors+to+register%22++percent&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Many websites offer incentives to get users to register often entry
into a free draw. As an incentive to getting people to register,
bangornews.com teamed up with a local lobster supplier who sponsored a
draw to win a lobster. The contest attracted 35,842 registered
members.
http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:yfqurAxQ0qMJ:www.digitaledge.org/DigArtPage.cfm%3FAID%3D4693+%22user+registration%22+percent&hl=en&ie=UTF-8>




<Additional links:>




<Example privacy statement.>
<http://www.intercarealberta.com/corporate/privacy.htm>


<Search strategy:>

<"personalization consortium">
<http://www-sj.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22personalization+consortium%22>


<"requiring registration" website users>
<http://www-sj.google.com/search?q=%22requiring+registration%22+website+users&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N>

<"user registration" percent>
<http://www-sj.google.com/search?q=%22user+registration%22+percent&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1>

<gvu survey>
<http://www-sj.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=gvu+survey>

<Hope this helps.>

This is a great answer and will be very helpful for me.

Hi there,

Although I haven't been able to find stats matching your query
precisely, perhaps a more useful question to ask would be "how do you
plan on designing this service such that personalized information can
be provided and physician/patient pairings can be maintained?".

If you can get a straight answer from the nay-sayers on this issue
then I would be able to help you determine the feasibility of their
vision.

answerguru-ga

Assume that for now the only transaction is an outbound message or
request to the physician from the patient, and the patient will have
no difficulty targeting the message to the appropriate physician by
using a sophisticated physician finder application on the web.  It's
true that in order to create a two-way channel between physician and
patient that both must be registered in order to log into a secure
message center to post or receive a reply.  But for now, I want to
just focus on the issue of registering in order to send outbound only
messages.  There are plenty of benefits of registration, but again I
just want to know that for this kind of service (post an outbound
message only), do end users see registration as a barrier (or in fact
might they expect it)?