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Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

blog.stunning.co

141–150 of 213 posts

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#141
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is always still annoying since you type in your email, then get sent off to your SSO page - and they can never be bothered to post your email over, so now you have to enter it again.

I kind of agree, but that seems more of a problem with the target system.

Anyway my name is remembered on my company SSO form, and I never sign in as someone else.

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#142
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is always still annoying since you type in your email, then get sent off to your SSO page - and they can never be bothered to post your email over, so now you have to enter it again.

I don't know if all of the SSO login sites do this, but Office 365 authentication makes it a huge pain in the ass to get back to the page that you tried to login from; usually you get dumped back to the home page, and have to try to navigate back to where ever it was you were.

Azure Active Directory does not make it easy to do this, with the way you have to explicitly whitelist post-back URLs, or else you get the dreaded login.microsoft.com 401 page of death, where you have to parse out information buried in the query-string to determine why you didn't get redirected properly (usually it is a trailing slash on the URL... %2F)

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#143

It's even worse when they use terms sign in and sign up, like Github! English is not my native language and it always confuses me.

GitHub is awful for this. If you're not signed in, the whole page is taken up with a giant signup UI, then in the top right there is another signup button. Next to the signup button, there is a sign-in button, but it has no border and is so deemphasized that if you don't know it's there it blends into the other useless links in the top bar.

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#144
post #92

A 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…

Another one: - Defocusing input fields in the middle of typing login information I guess i'm in the minority these days but I like to keep strong passwords in my head. This usually happens due to some side effect of the login page being absolutely fucking massive and not fully loading or executing before I start to fill in the form, then one of three things usually happens in order of frequency: 1. cookie banner bloc…

Since I started using facebook (2010) until today, it happens to unfocus and is very weird. If I go to login page, start typing my email very fast, it lose focus after 1s even before I finish typing.

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#145

Totally agree with the diagnosis of the problem but not the solution. I don't think switching the color is good UX—if I know the top of the page has a big green button', I'm not going to expect that button to have conditional behavior.

I think the solution has a more fundamental flaw. Reasons why people are no longer logged in:

1. The website timed them out.

2. They pressed “log out.”

3. They/their browser deleted their cookies.

4. They are on a different device.

5. They are in private/incognito mode in a new tab or window (say after clicking a link to confirm their email address at signup).

To the extent the solution works at all it only works for (1) and (2).

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#146

I'm about ready to unsubscribe from the LA Times for this BS. They seemingly invalidate my login every day, then when I get linked to an article, a huge pop-up obscures the article while reading it, and despite paying them for this damn service I can never even find a way to login. And if you do this to people just because their cookie went stale, then is this really a customer that you want to remind that they don't…

Are you linking from within Facebook or Twitter? I think they have their own mini browser so your logging in outside doesn't count inside.

That’s another one. Shipping an In-App browser should be punishable by 20 years of only browsing the internet via Pinterest.

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#147

Semi-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…

More clicks to log in than sign up is annoying, but what really bothers me is when they don't make it clear that the page brings you to both. Like if the button only says "Sign up" I'm going to look around for a bit for a "Log in" button first. If they're going to combine them, the least they could do is make it say "Sign up/Log in"

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#148

A 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 sucks if you are using a password manager. If I understand correctly, the reason behind this pattern is SSO. Most websites are gaining SSO capabilities. Before asking for your email/user, they don't really now if you're gonna login using password, or you should be redirected to an IdentityProvider. I'd be happy to know if there are better patter…

They could just check if the username needs to be redirected, and if they do then ignore the password. It wouldn't be that hard.

The only downside is the user submitting a password they dont need to, but if you're using js you could post the username first and only post the password if needed. That would be the same exact process, except from the users perspective it would be seamless. You could even have it check the username as they type, and lock the password field if its not needed.

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#149
You know, that's an odd thing. Pre-hoi polloi internet, there was an awful lot of push for interface standards on PC/workstation/Mac software. After the gold rush occurs, practically everyone's webpage displays the kinks of the developers or some toolkit. From a user's standpoint, there's not much value-added here.

Re: Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

#150

A 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…

As a non-native English speaker I always confused "sign in" and "sing up". I would prefer totally different words like "Enter" and "Register".
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