Let Them Pee: Avoiding the Sign-Up/Sign-In Mobile Antipattern by Greg Nudelman.
From the post:
The application SitOrSquat is a brilliant little piece of social engineering software that enables people to find bathrooms on the go, when they gotta go. Obviously, the basic use case implies a, shall we say, certain sense of urgency. This urgency is all but unfelt by the company that acquired the app, Procter and Gamble (P&G), as it would appear for the express purposes of marketing the Charmin brand of toilet paper. (It’s truly a match made in heaven—but I digress.)
Not content with the business of simply “Squeezing the Charmin” (that is, simple advertising), P&G executives decided for some unfathomable reason to force people to sign up for the app in multiple ways. First, as you can see in Figure 1, the app forces the customer (who is urgently looking for a place to relieve himself, let’s not forget) to use the awkward picker control to select his birthday to allegedly find out if he has been “potty trained.” This requirement would be torture on a normal day, but—I think you’ll agree—it’s excruciating when you really gotta go.
The horror of SitOrSquat doesn’t stop there.
Greg’s telling of the story is masterful. You owe it to yourself to read it more than once.
Relevant for mobile apps but also to “free” whitepapers, demo software or the other crap that requires name/email/phone details.
Name/email/phone details support marketing people who drain funds away from development and induce potential customers to look elsewhere.