Question: As part of a registration form I am building I need to, at some point, differentiate between whether the user is a 'student' or 'professor'. I've seen this handled in two different ways and was curious if anyone had any thoughts or research on the benefits/downsides of each way.

Two separate sign-up buttons on homepage

[www.lore.com](http://www.lore.com) and
[www.piazza.com](http://www.piazza.com)

One sign-up button, then two choices as part of the sign-up flow

[www.schoology.com](http://www.schoology.com)

The first method is one less click for the user but can potentially make the homepage more confusing with two call to action buttons next to each other. Also, with the first method, you couldn't just have a single 'sign-up' button elsewhere on the site, you'd have to provide two 'sign-up' options at all times.

Answer: 
**Don't make people think** before they have made a commitment to sign up (by selecting a sign up button). Every time you make a potential customer think you create an opportunity for then to choose not to and leave your site. It's also much harder to later optimise your page when you have two sign up buttons, as suddenly there are more variables to consider.

**Go for one sign up button** and then give an option early on in the sign up process for them to choose what they are signing up for.

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As a side note, have you considered the case where they are both a professor and a student? I know many professors and lecturers that are always studying.
As long as you are not capturing different attributes for different types of users, don't give a different sign-up links. If the attributes you are capturing are almost same, then no need to give two sign-up links.

A fitting example of different sign-ups for different type of users would be www.iwriter.com where you can sign-up as publisher and advertiser.