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

blog.stunning.co

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

#91
post #45

And this can be easily solvable by swapping the Sign up for Sign In after the first time you logged in a browser cookiejar. Obviously the devil is in the details, but it shouldn't be that complex having a visible Sign Up for potential new users and a visible Sign In for existing users...

Please don't! The worst thing is to swap meaning of a button at exactly same placement. If you are forced to do it then at least change background color and add some icon etc. But nothing can beat MS Teams "Close" document preview button, which once clicked, uncovers chat "Call" button. Add some laggy nature of Teams and you call the entire channel/chat just by trying to close an opened document with too many clicks.

But that would not change "immediately". Basically if you never logged in (in that browser) you see the "Sign up" more prominently and once you registered, you are already logged in (so you don't see anything at all) but if you do log out, then you would see the "Log In" clearly (and the "Sign up" will be somewhere also but not in the best spot).

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

#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 blocks input and defocuses
  2. it defocuses for no apparent reason (I suspect MVC "rendering")
  3. it "helpfully" re-focuses on the first input element
The last one is the most annoying because in the worst case i type my password in visible text.

Only login I regularly use that does not suffer from this problem (or any others!), is HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/login is 1.07KB

Causes only one secondary HTTP request to favicon at 7.66KB which doesn't interfere with the page in any way.

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

#95

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

I think they mostly do this so SSO customers do not accidentally enter their company password on the site every time.

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

#96

I was wondering if I was going blind for a while, staring seconds at websites trying to find where to login. Now I do what 'the computer illiterate' have apparently done for years; never go to the sites themselves, just put 'DigitalOcean login' etc in the addressbar (duckduckgo(or google)) and there you are.

And if you don't have an adblocker installed, the first 5 results will be adds which will get you to the home page, not the login page. At least in this case you make them pay for it.

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

#97
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…

> - Defocusing input fields in the middle of typing login information

Browser url-bars are shooketh...

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

#98
post #38

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.

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”.

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

#99
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - Defocusing input fields in the middle of typing login information Browser url-bars are shooketh...

The great internet speed divide has no patience for loading superfluous crap that is wasting their lives.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think making the user read instructions is the solution. Most (myself included) will begin typing before they finish reading. The current trend to only show the password box after the username is provided doesn't have to be bad for password managers. I use loads of sites that do this (so they can support SSO) and they just use hidden form fields so the password managers know what to do. I'd be curious to hear…

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.
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