Isn’t he kind of missing the obvious answer?
Use federated login. Almost everyone has an account somewhere - Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, Github, Twitter, Microsoft etc.
Use federated login. Almost everyone has an account somewhere - Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, Github, Twitter, Microsoft etc.
https://www.bart.com.hk/why-you-need-to-be-very-careful-abou...
What happens with multiple login choices is people forget what service they used, or end up accidentally creating another account (if it couldn't be auto-linked), or delete their fb/twitter/whatever and then lose access to things they didn't intend. Or get banned and forcibly lose access.
It also means you're relying on more 3rd party dependencies. And having the overheard of managing those, keeping updated with API/policy changes.
It's one of those things that seems simpler at first, but ends up being more complicated on both sides.
It is great because the friction to start using the service is low but you can add additional stuff after you know that you want to use it. Few services do exactly this. They will lock down your account and ask you to add a password after a day.
The support surface only increases over time and we found it not to be worth it.
These systems usually put log in and sign-up in the same flow so they are really saying:
"Do you remember if you signed up before? Which one of the 7 ways of we're presenting as an array of 4 or so buttons with secondary account selectors did you use?
If you pick the wrong one now you're going to get another account and have multiple discounts, reputation, credit, etc to manage.
Good luck!"
If you're lucky enough to still have the welcome email it'll sometimes narrow it, but not really. If I clicked on Facebook, selected my business account, then I'd get email in a Google account, which is exactly what I'd get if I had selected Google and the business account directly.
However, that's a different service and a different token which is usually enough to mess things up and create a different account.
What's worse is often if you're not logged in and then you get prompted to create an account in the flow. Let's say you haven't been there in 5 years.
Now you don't know if you've signed up or not so you Russian roulette yourself and if you're lucky, this time, it'll be a new account.
Because if it's the 5 year old account often it'll trigger all these legacy catch up things "oh redirect to the new terms of service. Give tour of new website, notify about mobile app, what were we doing? I completely forgot"
On Priceline for instance, if you sign up for a credit card to get $100 off the flight and then click an existing account to complete the transaction and not a new account, it gets completely confused and your discount vanishes.
It's a complex solution for a simple problem that appears to be friendly but in practice becomes user hostile because it's creating mountains of edge cases most have no interest in fully supporting.
It also gives a very poor understanding of how many human users you have. Those account creating metrics sure look great! Then you dig in and realize a bunch of people have 3 or 4 accounts, mostly unwittingly because there's an interface to encourage creating multiple unconnected accounts.
They don't realize it. They'll be on one device and stayed logged in. Then they get a new phone, forget how they logged in and bam, new account.
Your users would really prefer if it was just 1 account. A lot of your support load would go down if it was 1 account, you'd get better sales, have higher reviews, but here we are anyway.
And in the end, with a bunch of choices it's just another form of the memory game, which is the same cognitive user flow of the password, since 99% of users just reuse a handful of passwords on every site.
What makes it worse is even though only one flow in the multiple login system is the one you want, every other one will still work.
It's like being forced to take home the goat in a web version of Monty Halls Let's Make a Deal. Instead of seeing an error you're stuck with a new account that nobody on any side of the business flow wants.