Inciting user registration is hard. That’s why I always like to discover new and original registration forms on the Web.

Moof.com, a social music sharing Website, has a registration form that is presented as a conversation where the user has to fill in the blanks. This makes it much more interesting than the usual signup form. This approach is more human, friendly and inviting. Plus, the form is right up on their homepage, which shows the user how short the registration process really is.

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We decided to follow up on the success of our post How to Make Atypical Navigations Work. This time however, we decided to go beyond navigation formats to focus on concepts and ideas. The following examples should help you find inspiration:

Horizontal space

For the last 20 years, Websites have been laid out vertically. But, the Apple carrousel coupled with the efforts of several designers have opened the door to horizontal space navigation.

Taxi’s 15 Below Project is a good example of a succesful user-initiated horizontal navigation. Uniqlo 1000 and the Watch Avenue are different but also succesful approaches. With this mode of navigation, it’s important to give a lead-in to the content beyond the page and provide a secondary navigation device (eg. scroll bar). If you can leverage the mouse’s scroll wheel, you definitely should. Rockwerchter attempts a similar effect but fails because of the awkward primary and secondary controls.

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Some days, it seems like half of what I do online is sign up / login to Websites… Nobody can (and wants to) manage subscriptions to hundreds of sites. Businesses tend to wrongfully assume that registration will keep people from switching to other Websites but, a community’s value is not based on the number of members it has. Engagement and active members is what creates value. For every Facebook or Twitter out there, there’s literally hundreds of competitors asking you to sign up, engage and use their services hoping to become the next « standard ». Where OpenId failed to standardize registration over the Web, Facebook Connect might succeed by sheer popularity.

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Before leaving for the Holidays, we decided to share some of the most interesting Web uses we came across in 2008. We hope they can be of inspiration for you in the new year.

At the same time, we want to wish all our readers a Happy Holiday Season! Things will get very interesting for Kotsego in 2009.

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We spend a lot of time every year researching trends and discovering new design ideas. This year, we decided to share some of the best designs and redesigns we came across.

Websites were judged on the quality of the user experience, ability to meet business objectives and inventiveness of the interface. They appear in no particular order.

Brochure Websites

	Seymour Powell is a product design consultancy firm. Their Website is simple and elegant. It features some very nice interface tricks.
	Barcinski Jean Jean is a Dutch interactive agency. Their Website is very different. It can be viewed with or without 3D glasses…
	Marketel is canadian ad agency. Their Website succesfully recreates the mood of their office space. Simple and playful.
	Breaking Bad is an American TV show. The show’s Website is barely usable but got me watching the TV show… Exploratory Websites can sometimes work because they are not very usable.
	Every year, hundreds of designers try to reinvent navigation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Bio Bak is an example of a site with a different and interesting navigation system that works.

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