Making User Login More Usable
Written by April Cabello
In the advent of federated login and OpenID, not to mention the release of the usability study conducted by Yahoo on OpenID, it is a relief to stumble upon usability guidelines for enhancing the user login experience.
Gary Barber authored 11 guidelines on how to improve the user experience of login. Usability guidelines and standards make all our lives easier as these already provide how-tos and clearer directions on how to make things easier for the users.
Although user login may well be considered as just one of the many functions in a web site or a mobile service, it is the most crucial part of amost community-based and social networking services (SNS) that require user login and authentication in order to fully maximize features of a service.
As Barber puts it, “as the Web becomes easier to use, people are becoming less tolerant of bad interaction design and will often seek out an alternative service if it offers a better experience, depending on how much they have invested in your site.”
This behavior might well be one of the explanations as to why a lot of SNS fanatics have migrated from Friendster to Facebook. Then again, this merits another blog topic. =)
User login experience, almost all the time, is influenced by a host of other factors. These factors include:
- Security
- Legal policies
- Internal business processes
- Existing or previous user login experience
- Integration to legacy systems and platforms
- User platforms and environments
On the vantage point of usability, the design principles for federated login from Google Security’s Eric Sachs also holds true as the basis for creating usability guidelines for user login:
- Design for usability
- Don’t reinvent the wheel. Capitalize on the existing mental model of users on login and registration.
- Design for widespread adoption. Design for all kinds of users – from the beginners to early adopters, from those who know how to use OpenID and to those who are still not aware of it.
At the end of the day, despite all the other factors to be considered in designing the login user experience, what matters most is that the experience puts the users at its forefront.
The login user experience should be natural, or at least close to users’ mental models and what they have been accustomed to.
* Image courtesy of LiVEJOURNAL.
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