Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I feel like they address this in the article. What you say makes sense in a technical UML diagram point of view, but that's not how people work.

The examples they give are getting support and sharing things with another person with an account. As a user, both of those things are easier for me if there is an email associated with the account.

Said another way, the Account needs some human friendly global identifier. The email you use to log in is an obvious choice, and anything else would require extra work from the user to set up. You could have usernames, for example, but that complicates the signup process and still makes sharing things hard. I know my friends emails already, but I don't know what username they ended up with on this site.

I'd argue that this makes more sense in the real world than in a diagram, after being burnt in multiple real life experiences :)

The assumption both you and AnyList are making is that an email is "THE obvious choice". From a user experience perspective perhaps this "global sharing identifier" should be defined by them.

You'll notice that different generations have different online behaviors. For some, email is their main id. For others, it's their phone number (they don't know most of their friends' e-mail, but know their phone). For others, it's either online handles or nothing at all - think about the device set up for grandma with her daily To Do list.

Of course, having this approach would add some upfront dev work to them but allow them to navigate this much easier later on. And for anyone starting to develop their new app/site/product thinking about this early on can reduce a lot of future headaches.

That's a very idealistic opinion.

People don't care about usernames and other crap. They want an easy option - enter email, communicate over email and be found using email. This isn't their banking app or anything that important.

Nobody "wants to use their email". They just want to start using whatever app or service they're trying to connect to as quickly as possible - why exactly do you think "Sign in with X" became so popular in the first place?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com