It’s important to engage with your users as soon as possible. Complex sign up forms, account activation and verification, captcha are are useful tools, but also obstacles to a user achieving site goals.

A lot has to be said for gradual engagement as a way to overcome that. The idea is simple – get your users using your product as soon as possible, and if they love it, they’ll sign up

At Graphic.ly we took that process little further. We didn’t just get the users using our social app before signup. We got them involved before we’d released anything. This is by no means the first time this process has been attempted. I followed closely as Mark Boulton and his team worked on the community-lead redesign of drupal.

But this isn’t a redesign. We are engaging with users to craft something they will love. And its going to be an exciting journey along the way. Some of the feedback we’ve had at this early stage has been overwhelming – this is a community with a lot of passion.

You can follow the progress we make by:

Signing up as a beta tester
Reading our company blog
Following us on Twitter