Frustration is one of or the primary drivers in the purchase and use of computers.
"Getting them to do anything at all,makes us overlook there fundimental uselessness"
Douglas Adams
Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
101–110 of 213 posts
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Oreilly learning platform does this. Email and password field on the same page and a message under the email field > Using Single Sign-on (SSO)? Simply enter your company email address and click sign in. Seems simple enough to me as a user, not sure how most people interact with it though or how many companies A/B test these things.
My company uses an SSO provider with Google Workspace. Most employees have no idea about any of that, they wouldn't know and probably would type their company password there.
The password field disappears if you enter an SSO-compatible email address.
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, what ever happened to Create account/Register and Log in? Why have two very different options with almost the same label?
Heh, there was a time when Microsoft’s Polish translators (who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise) decided “Sign in” should be translated as „Zarejestruj”. Which is what everyone else called the “new account” button. They managed to fix it since then to a much more reasonable and much less confusing „Zaloguj się”.
Oh, I remember that incident. Since then I've become suspicious of any translations from English to Polish.
Especially given that I have some insider knowledge on how large publishers translate tech books and the way they do it is, in one word, awful.
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#104A couple of frequent mistakes with signin which are usually caused by junior product owners/ux persons not reflecting on what they are doing and blindly copying what they believe is the way to do things. - Having confusing language and poor differentiation between the sign in and sign up form. Symptom, users start filling in the wrong form only to realize their mistake. - Separating the password from the email field…
> Separating the password from the email field with an extra mouse click I think they mostly do this so SSO customers do not accidentally enter their company password on the site every time.
Right, often those sites have customers with different SSO systems. I type my company mail address and am redirected to company SSO.
I like this more than other sites where I have to find the right button between different login options (sign in with google, sign in with facebook, sign in with sso, ...) and then have to type the company name ... whatever might be the choice the admins did there that time ...
I also think that approach was initially created by Yahoo! So they could shown the user's avatar on the password page to prove authority. Not sure whether that still is a thing somewhere, considering that a recent trend is not to verify whether an account exists ...
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company uses an SSO provider with Google Workspace. Most employees have no idea about any of that, they wouldn't know and probably would type their company password there.
The password field disappears if you enter an SSO-compatible email address.
Then you have to either leak a list of each customer to the client to verify there or send each key stroke and consider latency ...
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#106This is becoming more and more common with major sites, and it’s really bloody annoying. Some are putting “Sign In” behind some tiny dropdown in the nav, not just grayed out or small but invisible unless you hunt for it. They know exactly why they’re doing though, and I think OP is preaching to the converted. Those doing this don’t need a tutorial explaining how not to do it, they need to lose money (users) until the…
I don't understand. Why is it to their advantage to have their users struggle to log in?
They probably have metrics suggesting that having both sign up and sign in buttons on the page leads to lower sign up rates than having only a sign up button, or something along those lines.
Rather than find a more in depth/better designed solution, it's easier just to remove the "sign in" button and any "confusion" that might cause for users who would otherwise complete the sign up workflow. If their A/B testing indicates that removing the button improves sign up rates, that's exactly what they'll do.
It's super-annoying and short-sighted - not to mention lazy - but this kind of micro/over-optimisation of behaviour on the web has been de rigeur for at least a decade now.
A better approach would be to try to understand why "confusion" around sign up/sign in is happening - i.e., what's the real reason having both buttons/links on a page decreases sign up rate? Root cause the issue and you can fix the real problem in a way that probably doesn't annoy your customers. That's effort though and most customers probably don't care enough to complain about the annoyance of hunting around for a sign in button or link.
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#107I hate this so much. They've all copied each other to the extent that having a hidden sign in button is requirement for a "modern" site.
Back in the day it was the other way around. Sign in was primary and sign up was secondary (often accompanied by something like "don't have an account? Sign up"). You just know some busybody UX person saw that and argued this was bad for new members. Well now you've just screwed it up in the opposite direction. Well done.
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#108https://headspace.com/ is such a good example of this, login button is in probably the worst possible place on the page. And to make it even worse your login sessions are invalidated almost every day so you _have_ to login every time you use the website.
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#109Semi-related: The trend of the not having a log in button and only a sign up button, requiring multiple clicks just to login. I get that less friction for a new user is better being the thinking but I truly hate having to go through multiple pages just to sign in. What happened to having sign in/sign up being on the same page? Seems the simple and easy, as well as lowest friction way of splitting the difference betwe…
I miss going to foo.com and having user/pass fields on the top row of the screen, with maybe a sign up link next to it.
A handful of websites I visit periodically have username and password fields readily available....but they are registration forms not login forms, and if you put in your existing credentials, it’ll just tell you that you already have an account and should log in instead. You couldn’t just, you know, log me in with the information I just provided instead of telling me to provide it again on a different page? Drives me up the wall!
Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website
#110This drives me nuts. It feels the same as the insurance company's phone menu asking if you're interested in purchasing a policy or submitting a claim, where the former choice get you an instant human being and the latter a 45 minute wait. In other words, it signals that you're more interested in signing up new customers than serving your current customers.