Registration that doesn't suck

I spent quite a bit of time debugging the registration process users go through when they purchase FuzzMeasure. In the current situation, I mail users a standard plaintext email that contains a (pretty long) key that the user must copy & paste into FuzzMeasure.

In all fairness, I spent my initial chunk of time on the registration process just getting it to work properly. Getting the end-to-end experience of purchasing FuzzMeasure via PayPal and issuing working keys gave me enough grief as it stands. Once it all seemed to work, the copy & paste idea made a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, the copy & paste process did not work so well in practice. Users had trouble getting the key copied, so I added the ability for FuzzMeasure to detect the key on the clipboard only if the key got copied perfectly. That only solved half the equation.

Then, I learned that even if the key appeared to look alright, Entourage and third-party spell checkers would somehow muck up the text that got copied! I even had some users attempt to hand-enter the very ugly key string manually in their frustration. Clearly, I had to do something about improving the registration experience, because I want to ensure that no user gets left without a working application for any period of time after purchasing.

Enter FuzzMeasure 1.3, and its No Suckiness Guaranteed registration scheme. The process now goes like this:

1. Purchase FuzzMeasure via PayPal
2. Receive automated email, containing a license key attachment
3. Launch the attachment, which will launch FuzzMeasure
4. Enter the name and email you registered with
5. Enjoy

I built the above icon solely for the new fumekey document that contains the user's license key. Nice, huh?

For existing users, your copy of FuzzMeasure 1.3 will still work with your 1.2 registration. In the future, I will send you license key files if you need to re-register FuzzMeasure. I plan to add this automated feature to my website shortly (to coincide with the 1.3 release).