Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks (2014)

nngroup.com

17 points·etherio··3 comments

Agreed. I also dislike the sites that require me to submit my address and credit card info before they will tell me how much the shipping charges will be. I almost never will do that. They should allow me to know the total price up-front before I need to enter my credit card info.

>require me to submit my address and credit card info

You do realize that for those that don't require credit card info that you can enter a random address in your zipcode to get past the "enter address" part before you can learn that the shipping on a $19.99 item is going to be 24.95 after 'handling' is added in, right?

I've entered random names and addresses many times to get to the "how much will shipping cost" pages. Then I can make an informed decision whether to continue or abort the transaction.

If I decide to continue, I just start over going through checkout with real info.

> Even though we have recommended against this since 1999, some sites still force users to log in before presenting them with any real content.

It is constantly astonishing to me how dedicated we are as an industry to ignoring prior art.

Nielsen Norman are among the best-respected UX experts in the world. They publish several decades of research on their web site for free, so everyone can benefit from it even if they can't afford to hire them directly. And yet even twenty years of them saying the same thing has not been sufficient to lodge that thing into the conventional wisdom. Just about everywhere, the whims of PMs and lead designers count for more than all that work by NN does. If those whims conflict with NN's findings, the whims always win.

I have no idea how to fix this. It would require a major cultural shift, probably. It's just depressing to see the same mistakes getting made over and over and over again.

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