This advice is too generic. There are many, many applications where a persistent identity is required. What would happen if Hacker News had completely anonymous users? :P
A ticketing startup is a good example of a startup which could be used without a dedicated user account. But that's the minority.
But I don't want to hand off my FB, Google, etc to various websites. If a site only offers that, I simply close it and find another part of the web to browse instead.
2. Don't force visitors to use a 3rd-party provider. Always have a local option. As a counter point to (1), many visitors won't want to use their Facebook/Google accounts for authenticating to other sites.
I tend to prefer the oauth options myself... I don't want to have to enter a bunch of information, or add yet another site to lastpass if I can avoid it... Though, if they ask for too much, I tend to just deny and move on...
For example, it's interesting that a site within the past couple of minutes to sign into could use a local account, facebook or google... I clicked fb first, they wanted contact info and my full friends list... google, just my email... so I let it in with my google account.
I think it really depends... I wouldn't offer social logins without also having a local option, but it really depends on your audience.
But it requires you to have an account with some other party, such as Facebook or Google. What if you don't want that? Suddenly this service that you do want to use becomes unusable.
And it also tells Facebook / Google etc what other sites you use, which is none of their business (not that they won't grab that info because of like buttons, analytics, embedded fonts or hosted JS but that's another matter).
Can't have your cake and eat it too. If you complain that you don't want to have to log into sites, it makes less sense to complain when there are ways to have unified logins so that's not necessary anymore.
I would say that in my experience, account creation at online retailers (even Amazon) is very rarely something I've found useful for myself. It may well benefit the company.
I don't want my card details to be saved, and typing in my address and card number take less than a minute anyway. Newsletters almost universally go to spam because I'm not a landowner who has the disposable income to just buy arbitrary things that are advertised to me.
I think generally developers are aware of this, but they're chasing the few that do respond to such tactics.
The advice isn't "don't have accounts," its "don't make visitors make accounts." Having an option is good... if you don't plan on coming back or you're worried about your security, you don't have to store anything on their servers. If you're a frequent customer and you want the convenience, you can make an account.
He's not talking about requiring accounts for all users, only visitors. You can browse HN without limit without an account. Also, it is trivially easy to make HN accounts. My guess is that the OP approves of HN.
These are just usability guidelines, almost all of which are dealbreakers for me when I visit sites.
For example, when I use my password manager to generate a 64 char password for a new account somewhere, and get an error message saying "Please limit your password to 3 to 20 chars using only letters and numbers," I just have to laugh to myself.
I mean, think about what this tells you about the creators of that site.
> Always allow your users to close their account. This should remove all information about them from your service to the extent possible without disrupting the integrity of other information.
I think this would be much better if it answered the question "Why?"
This is pretty obvious from the user perspective and from the site runners perspective, something you do not want. Obviously a user who closes their account want to make aure their information is safegaurded and no longer used. This is especially salient now that Facebook own user data like pictures and can profit not only from information, buy sellig photos and other user-contributed things as assets to be used for commercial purposes.
From the site owners perspective, they want the data. Maybe they sell it, or maybe they want to provide a nice user experience. Welcome back user, here is all of your information, we kept it for you so it is not lost. Thanks for rejoining.
In the end, it really depends on what kind of site and what kind of users you have. Sites will prob not choose to delete all the information they have, much to some of their users dismay.
By having you create an account I get your email. By getting your email I can start retargeting you for advertising purposes and perhaps even you will tick the box allowing me to send you spam. This is called customer retention.
> Use a slow, secure hash function like SHA-256. Don't use MD5!
Don't use a single round of any hash function, including SHA-256.
You shouldn't try to roll your own crypto, and you shouldn't try to roll your own password verification either. Use bcrypt and you'll get salting and you'll get a multi-round hashing process that has the ability to easily scale up in complexity as computing power continues to increase.
Being incorrect in one area is often indicative of wrong thinking in many areas. The recommendation to use SHA-256 is dangerous and it makes me distrust the entire post.
There's a few minor issues with something like bcrypt, it is computationally expensive for the server as well as the client... if you set things marginally high, it's a relatively easy point of not just login attack, but a DDOS attack surface as well. You could do a shadow hash, that's intentionally weak (high chance of conflicts) or even a bitwise composite as an early check to see if a password matches the first check before doing the full bcrypt attempt... you'll also need to do a random wait before returning a result that resembles a full server-side check to reduce timing attacks.
You can also either move the computation to the client over a secure channel, or have another challenge/response method in place. I've actually thought about having a bcrypt challenge/response (from a pool of known values at the server) in order to reduce abuse of an API structure or interface. It was a thought exercise in how to approach such a method better... It was actually a thought on how to approach something like a next generation hive/bittorrent protocol to reduce the attack surface a bit.
In any case, just be careful when you implement more secure hashes with a high compute cost... it can bite you in the ass if you aren't careful.
> if you set things marginally high, it's a relatively easy point of not just login attack, but a DDOS attack surface as well
That's no excuse for using a worse hashing method. You need to rate-limit login attempts anyway to prevent (or at least make impractical) brute forcing / dictionary attack attempts. But it's a can of worms either way (next step is captchas because of tor / anonymizer proxies etc.).
Not just that, but SHA-256 isn't slow. It's slower than CRC or MD5, sure, but it's slowness isn't a feature like blowfish's is. A single round of Blowfish, by comparison, takes time to set up the key and IV that SHA256 doesn't; bcrypt compounds that.
According to http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html you could check ~6480 bytes of SHA256 in the time that it would take you to just set up your first blowfish check. If you're trying to brute-force an 8-character password, you're looking at 141 cycles per password for SHA256 and 114,950 cycles per password for a single round of blowfish.
Some of us have been online for decades, and have seen our fair share of walled gardened apps with a login screen hiding the app. We are sort of used to registering, but we are also sick to the teeth of having to register too. The problem can lie in the micro copy too; you often see "10 seconds to register" or, "one click login". It is rarely that - it usually entails a frightful tale of password management, making the password match the requirements of the app (alphanumeric and maximum 8 characters nonsense), alongside a11y issues, PIA (Personally identifiable information) issues, and a slew of other barriers to entry.
Very much something that has gone un-noticed by developers for a long time, is that login systems are an obstacle and something to be avoided if we can. Login systems can not be solved with Single Sign On (SSO) / OpenID systems either. (Not all of us have FB/Google accounts, and never presume so) Every developer is scrambling to find a solution for the 'login problem', and completely overlook how login systems complicate things for their users. A lot of login systems suffer from Not Invented Here™ syndrome. Often online forms are a sort of 'mystery meat' where users don't know what to expect there. I once saw an account registration form asking to include an emoji character in my password, for example.
Seriously. Our local burrito chain has a loyalty program where you get a little card, and so on, but you have a password. Right, because I really want to remember a Burrito Password.
I would guess most are either "burrito", "password", "1234" or similar with the remainder being forgotten by the person who set it the instant they entered it. I am curious what percentage have a reasonably strong password that they can actually remember for their burrito account.
Actually, most of this advice is too general to be good. Your website is special, and you should think through all of these questions rather than just taking a blog post's advice at face value.
Maybe you don't display it as an "account", but I can't think of a single commercial website where you shouldn't at least be taking an email address as part of the transaction. Yeah, users love to complain about registration, but I can tell you from direct experience that they love to complain even more loudly when they have a problem, and you can't find a history of their transaction because they never gave you a way to identify them -- I can guarantee that they never printed out your transaction record. Account-less purchases will have their way with you. Don't do it.
As for the rest of it, maybe it makes sense for you to provide OAuth options; maybe it doesn't. It really depends on the domain. Likewise, maybe it makes sense to offer "traditional" login, or maybe it doesn't (Tinder seems to be doing okay). The password advice is good.
Developers are this unique audience of people who have -- well, let's say "highly evolved" -- expectations about how web businesses "should" work. Most normal people don't share their expectations, so don't make assumptions without direct validation from your target audience.
I guess what bothers me the most about "advice" like this is what makes the person stating the advice qualified to give the advice? This is not to say it's right or wrong but with all due respect to all those on HN that are still in college (such as Ben the OP) why do you feel that you are uniquely qualified to offer this? Noting that you posted it to HN and not a third party that somehow tripped on it ...
I could have provided a clearer intent in my post, but here goes.
These are simply usability guidelines that I've built up over my time interacting with hundreds of websites. I find myself annoyed by certain things over and over, so I decided to put them together in the form of a list. I don't believe I am more qualified to write this than anyone else who has spent a decent amount of time on the Internet.
Furthermore, there are always exceptions. I'm not implying (or I hope people are not inferring) that no site should ever provide a sign-in/account feature. You may have a compelling reason to provide this, and that's great. But don't allow or require people to do this when it offers them no value.
First, thanks for giving your thoughts and responding.
I think that when you say this (as you did in the blog post):
"here are a couple of rules to follow to ensure a good user experience:"
...particularly using "rules" you have to keep in mind that anyone and everyone could be reading your post.
And they very well might think that you are more qualified in your opinions than someone who has come to those conclusion by observation [1] and therefore give those "rules" greater authority than they deserve. Since, by your reply to my question, you say are actually just "simply usability guidelines that I've built up over my time interacting with hundreds of websites".
Now of course if you are a business offering to sell a product or service I for one think that it's a good idea to be definitive and state an opinion in many cases as if it's a fact. Regardless of whether it is or not. [2]
[1] Which of course we all do from time to time.
[2] But even with that I would never tell people in a blog post that this is a "rule" just something that I feel (and for what reason) is appropriate from my perspective.
For a project I'm working on right now our team decided to simply eschew user accounts even though it's a site that is built around user generated content and comments. Everything is done by entering your email address (which the site doesn't surface) and then clicking a confirm link we send via email.
So far,our testers love it. It seems to have gotten them quickly past the user dread. It also means your first participation in our site can happen by submitting one form and confirming one email. That's somewhere between two and five steps shorter than had we required account setup. While it adds an extra step to subsequent interaction, email
confirmation, we feel like it's a good trade off for them. After all, going through a password reset when you come back to the site is an easy way to lose people.
And for us, it eliminated a lot of development headaches. When a user first participates in the site we assign them a randomly generated username. And they can change it to whatever they like ... They just fill put the change my username form and confirm by email.
Obviously, if we wanted to save credit card info or something like that we might need to modify this approach for PCI compliance, but I believe a fundamentally similar workflow could be employed even then.
I'm not sure I understand, you're saying that you are sending an email for every login? It surprises me that your testers seem to love that, it seems very obnoxious to me. I also don't quite understand:
> After all, going through a password reset when you come back to the site is an easy way to lose people
Most password reset forms I've seen just ask the user for their email, send them a link and ask them for a new password. This is nearly the same flow as your regular login flow, if I understand correctly?
I'm guessing there is a long (week or two) session cookie that they only need to re-confirm their email after a few weeks of not being on the site... maybe as a secondary token/cookie to re-entering their email, if it matches the second token, they're in...
It'd be similar to 2fa, but without the first factor (a password).... I work on a similar site, where each real interaction is a financial transaction... since there's no real need to login after that transaction, there's no password, they're buying a product, and that is delivered via email... no need for the hassle of creating an account to login with... an account is made with a random password under the covers, but it's never really needed.
I disagree. The OP is talking about usability, first and foremost. Everything you said is true, but none of it speaks to usability and UX.
I agree so strongly with the bulleted points made, that it made me imagine a standard, a symbol of compliance. Sites complying with all 6 points could use some sort of validator, like W3C.
Sites/apps that make me sign up for something trivial, sign up through FB only, won't allow me to use my global identifier (my email), or limit the length of my password, are often rejected (by me) out of hand. I simply don't have the time or the patience to deal with their special circumstances and they need me more than I need them, 99.9% of the time.
Not sure you guys disagree! The parent said, "Maybe you don't display it as an "account", but I can't think of a single commercial website where you shouldn't at least be taking an email address as part of the transaction."
Then #3 on the bulleted list of six points says, "Username = Email. Don't make people remember a username for your site. You may allow them to pick a username later on that can be used in lieu of their email address, e.g. as the URL for a profile page, but don't force them to use a username to log in."
The quoted list is under "and if you do offer accounts..." on the blog post, and that's totally, utterly wrong for many sites. So yeah, if the OP thinks this advice is good enough to merit a verification badge, we disagree. The advice is bad.
It can make all the sense in the world to make "accounts" a very lightweight thing. But if you're taking payments or doing anything that might conceivably result in a user support request (e.g. storing user data or taking some action on their behalf), then you need to have some form of registration. And once you have registration, you'll need to have some way to prevent drive-by registration by total strangers -- otherwise you'll start getting complaints from people that some jerk/spammer signed them up for your site.
There are reasons that this stuff exists, and authentication always deserves careful thought.
Man, I'd get behind a standard and stamp for this, it'd save me so much time!
I'm sick of accounts. Fuck accounts, I've got hundreds of the little shits, every one a looming security time bomb. Most of them I cannot delete. I've just stopped making them now, which locks me out of pretty much every new product, but I consider it worthwhile in exchange for not creating more accounts.
There are better ways of doing this shit though. For example, firefox hello does not require an account like skype does. It just makes a hyperlink with a unique ID, and I can share it.
If you need to track the customers transaction, why not link it to a unique URL?
Unfortunately account recovery requires a secondary means of contact... I'm much more likely to give a new site my email address than a credit card number, phone number or other piece of personally identifying information.
Khan Academy used to let you watch videos, do questions, and collect points. Then you would sign in to claim them.
Their new homepage looks to push you to sign up first though. There is still a link to "Unclaimed points > Sign up to claim your points" in the top nav.
Agree or disagree with the post, you are a sample size of 1. If you said on your site, these were the patterns you see, then sure maybe it is in line with a macro-trend. If n=1 the data is usually not very helpful.
I never use websites that require me to have an account somewhere else. Either have no account at all (especially if you don't need one, that's just friction) or set up a minimal password system as an option next to FB/G/TW or whatever else is in fashion as external authorization provider.
In addition to the other threads, the fact is businesses need contact information to make money. Upsells, deal emails, etc., are all a critical part of their revenue streams.
So removing this would cost them a great deal of money.
> fact is businesses need contact information to make money. Upsells, deal emails, etc.,
Fortunately, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. For example, price comparison websites (I built, ran and sold one) need nothing of the sort, it's just a mediocre marketing tool (your users are much better at recommending your product than you are!).
I felt oddly vindicated when he mentioned Ticketfly specifically... It irked me too that they don't allow guest checkout, so in making http://showboarder.com I put in the extra thought/effort to make it an option.
That said, having implemented this I can see why many services don't. It's an entire other case to consider when thinking about security, user experience, etc. and for many it could definitely be more trouble than it's worth. It's just a question of values if you make it a priority or not.
I'd suggest that the guest use case is the most important one and that account generation/creation/etc is for most sites the use case that should come second.
Why not let users complete their transaction with only an email and payment info — and then send an optional account confirmation link along with their receipt?
I agree with the author that in the short game not providing your own accounts is attractive. However in the long game it doesn't look so good. Unfortunately there are problems with using federated auth everywhere.
* It's a single place for a compromise to occur - the devastation of a serious identity provider hack completely upends the security of huge swaths of the internet in a single shot
* Breaks in fedauth protocols and implementations, similarly, presents a large auth crisis for the entire Web
* It's a single place for legal or extralegal pressure for governments to access services and data on behalf of everyone
* It creates market friction. If federated login had been around in large numbers when Myspace was the big social platform we'd still be using Myspace for the sheer reason we need it to vouch for our identity. It makes the big fedauth players 'too important to fail'
One should consider options carefully and determine whether a good user experience can be offered without further centralizing the Web.
As a platform that sells tickets to events (https://www.theticketfairy.com/), I feel that I should make a counterargument to not making users create an account.
Our checkout process requires no existing account, so you click on the buy button, enter your name, email address and billing info, and you create a password at the end, after which you DO have an account. We feel that this is much better UX than most other ticketing sites that send you to registration forms before you can continue the checkout.
We used to receive many, many support requests from people who'd lost the email containing their tickets. We then added order history and the ability to download their tickets by logging into their accounts and this resulted in a massive drop in support emails.
Another key point is that most people realise they've lost the ticket email only a few hours before the event is about to start, so we get very panicky last-minute emails from people freaking out that they're not going to be able to get in. Just giving people the option to log into an account and retrieve their tickets not only dramatically reduces our workload but also provides them with peace of mind.
We're adding 3rd-party login shortly (primarily Facebook) but will keep email/password as an option. However, even with 3rd-party login, we'll still need to confirm the email address as most people are used to email as their delivery method.
Saying all this, most of the advice in the article is valid and we follow many of the points. Our username is the email address and we enforce HTTPS on all pages (with HSTS headers).
> support requests from people who'd lost the email containing their tickets
"Losing email" is a problem completely distinct from the UX question. Since "losing email" is more-or-less impossible in year 2015, it isn't a reason to force people to make accounts. There are other ways to deal with this problem.
>Since "losing email" is more-or-less impossible in year 2015
Actually losing email is basically impossible but non-technical people still do it all the time. What they mean is that they can't find the email they are after. "I am not good at searching" is indistinguishable from "the email is gone".
Exactly, or their phone only syncs emails back a week/month and they bought the ticket months before the event. Loads of scenarios where this can happen when you run a consumer-facing ecommerce platform
The worst thing about having to register an account on damn near everything is the security implications. I lost track of the number of unique passwords that are stored in my LastPass a long time ago. Seriously, the number is absolutely ridiculous to the point that trying to manage those accounts manually and in a secure fashion is, I'd argue, too much of an unnecessary burden on people.
If you want your readers to follow your advice, tell them _why_ they should, and not simply _what_ to do.
See what I did there?
Are readers of this piece supposed to follow the advice, like sheep, simply because they are told to? Or because they will get more usage? Or because it will make the world a better place? Or some other reason? We can only guess.
84 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadA ticketing startup is a good example of a startup which could be used without a dedicated user account. But that's the minority.
Most websites aren't special enough to warrant yet another account. Of course they need to keep track of people.
For example, it's interesting that a site within the past couple of minutes to sign into could use a local account, facebook or google... I clicked fb first, they wanted contact info and my full friends list... google, just my email... so I let it in with my google account.
I think it really depends... I wouldn't offer social logins without also having a local option, but it really depends on your audience.
And it also tells Facebook / Google etc what other sites you use, which is none of their business (not that they won't grab that info because of like buttons, analytics, embedded fonts or hosted JS but that's another matter).
It would turn into /g/ without the pictures?
I don't want my card details to be saved, and typing in my address and card number take less than a minute anyway. Newsletters almost universally go to spam because I'm not a landowner who has the disposable income to just buy arbitrary things that are advertised to me.
I think generally developers are aware of this, but they're chasing the few that do respond to such tactics.
Just think of the huge number of people have kindles with 1 click buy.
The 'few' indeed.
These are just usability guidelines, almost all of which are dealbreakers for me when I visit sites.
For example, when I use my password manager to generate a 64 char password for a new account somewhere, and get an error message saying "Please limit your password to 3 to 20 chars using only letters and numbers," I just have to laugh to myself.
I mean, think about what this tells you about the creators of that site.
I think this would be much better if it answered the question "Why?"
From the site owners perspective, they want the data. Maybe they sell it, or maybe they want to provide a nice user experience. Welcome back user, here is all of your information, we kept it for you so it is not lost. Thanks for rejoining.
In the end, it really depends on what kind of site and what kind of users you have. Sites will prob not choose to delete all the information they have, much to some of their users dismay.
Don't use a single round of any hash function, including SHA-256.
You shouldn't try to roll your own crypto, and you shouldn't try to roll your own password verification either. Use bcrypt and you'll get salting and you'll get a multi-round hashing process that has the ability to easily scale up in complexity as computing power continues to increase.
[1] http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
I like people offering help to others, but I read your article before you updated this... and I immediately wrote you off because of that.
It's great to offer advice, but can't seem to find any indication of what your experience is.
GAE won't let you upload and run modules that are C-based, so bcrypt is out of the question.
You can also either move the computation to the client over a secure channel, or have another challenge/response method in place. I've actually thought about having a bcrypt challenge/response (from a pool of known values at the server) in order to reduce abuse of an API structure or interface. It was a thought exercise in how to approach such a method better... It was actually a thought on how to approach something like a next generation hive/bittorrent protocol to reduce the attack surface a bit.
In any case, just be careful when you implement more secure hashes with a high compute cost... it can bite you in the ass if you aren't careful.
That's no excuse for using a worse hashing method. You need to rate-limit login attempts anyway to prevent (or at least make impractical) brute forcing / dictionary attack attempts. But it's a can of worms either way (next step is captchas because of tor / anonymizer proxies etc.).
According to http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html you could check ~6480 bytes of SHA256 in the time that it would take you to just set up your first blowfish check. If you're trying to brute-force an 8-character password, you're looking at 141 cycles per password for SHA256 and 114,950 cycles per password for a single round of blowfish.
Very much something that has gone un-noticed by developers for a long time, is that login systems are an obstacle and something to be avoided if we can. Login systems can not be solved with Single Sign On (SSO) / OpenID systems either. (Not all of us have FB/Google accounts, and never presume so) Every developer is scrambling to find a solution for the 'login problem', and completely overlook how login systems complicate things for their users. A lot of login systems suffer from Not Invented Here™ syndrome. Often online forms are a sort of 'mystery meat' where users don't know what to expect there. I once saw an account registration form asking to include an emoji character in my password, for example.
Maybe you don't display it as an "account", but I can't think of a single commercial website where you shouldn't at least be taking an email address as part of the transaction. Yeah, users love to complain about registration, but I can tell you from direct experience that they love to complain even more loudly when they have a problem, and you can't find a history of their transaction because they never gave you a way to identify them -- I can guarantee that they never printed out your transaction record. Account-less purchases will have their way with you. Don't do it.
As for the rest of it, maybe it makes sense for you to provide OAuth options; maybe it doesn't. It really depends on the domain. Likewise, maybe it makes sense to offer "traditional" login, or maybe it doesn't (Tinder seems to be doing okay). The password advice is good.
Developers are this unique audience of people who have -- well, let's say "highly evolved" -- expectations about how web businesses "should" work. Most normal people don't share their expectations, so don't make assumptions without direct validation from your target audience.
I guess what bothers me the most about "advice" like this is what makes the person stating the advice qualified to give the advice? This is not to say it's right or wrong but with all due respect to all those on HN that are still in college (such as Ben the OP) why do you feel that you are uniquely qualified to offer this? Noting that you posted it to HN and not a third party that somehow tripped on it ...
OP do you care to give your thoughts?
These are simply usability guidelines that I've built up over my time interacting with hundreds of websites. I find myself annoyed by certain things over and over, so I decided to put them together in the form of a list. I don't believe I am more qualified to write this than anyone else who has spent a decent amount of time on the Internet.
Furthermore, there are always exceptions. I'm not implying (or I hope people are not inferring) that no site should ever provide a sign-in/account feature. You may have a compelling reason to provide this, and that's great. But don't allow or require people to do this when it offers them no value.
I think that when you say this (as you did in the blog post):
"here are a couple of rules to follow to ensure a good user experience:"
...particularly using "rules" you have to keep in mind that anyone and everyone could be reading your post.
And they very well might think that you are more qualified in your opinions than someone who has come to those conclusion by observation [1] and therefore give those "rules" greater authority than they deserve. Since, by your reply to my question, you say are actually just "simply usability guidelines that I've built up over my time interacting with hundreds of websites".
Now of course if you are a business offering to sell a product or service I for one think that it's a good idea to be definitive and state an opinion in many cases as if it's a fact. Regardless of whether it is or not. [2]
[1] Which of course we all do from time to time.
[2] But even with that I would never tell people in a blog post that this is a "rule" just something that I feel (and for what reason) is appropriate from my perspective.
So far,our testers love it. It seems to have gotten them quickly past the user dread. It also means your first participation in our site can happen by submitting one form and confirming one email. That's somewhere between two and five steps shorter than had we required account setup. While it adds an extra step to subsequent interaction, email confirmation, we feel like it's a good trade off for them. After all, going through a password reset when you come back to the site is an easy way to lose people.
And for us, it eliminated a lot of development headaches. When a user first participates in the site we assign them a randomly generated username. And they can change it to whatever they like ... They just fill put the change my username form and confirm by email.
Obviously, if we wanted to save credit card info or something like that we might need to modify this approach for PCI compliance, but I believe a fundamentally similar workflow could be employed even then.
> After all, going through a password reset when you come back to the site is an easy way to lose people
Most password reset forms I've seen just ask the user for their email, send them a link and ask them for a new password. This is nearly the same flow as your regular login flow, if I understand correctly?
It'd be similar to 2fa, but without the first factor (a password).... I work on a similar site, where each real interaction is a financial transaction... since there's no real need to login after that transaction, there's no password, they're buying a product, and that is delivered via email... no need for the hassle of creating an account to login with... an account is made with a random password under the covers, but it's never really needed.
I agree so strongly with the bulleted points made, that it made me imagine a standard, a symbol of compliance. Sites complying with all 6 points could use some sort of validator, like W3C.
Sites/apps that make me sign up for something trivial, sign up through FB only, won't allow me to use my global identifier (my email), or limit the length of my password, are often rejected (by me) out of hand. I simply don't have the time or the patience to deal with their special circumstances and they need me more than I need them, 99.9% of the time.
This is great consolidated advice.
Then #3 on the bulleted list of six points says, "Username = Email. Don't make people remember a username for your site. You may allow them to pick a username later on that can be used in lieu of their email address, e.g. as the URL for a profile page, but don't force them to use a username to log in."
It can make all the sense in the world to make "accounts" a very lightweight thing. But if you're taking payments or doing anything that might conceivably result in a user support request (e.g. storing user data or taking some action on their behalf), then you need to have some form of registration. And once you have registration, you'll need to have some way to prevent drive-by registration by total strangers -- otherwise you'll start getting complaints from people that some jerk/spammer signed them up for your site.
There are reasons that this stuff exists, and authentication always deserves careful thought.
I'm sick of accounts. Fuck accounts, I've got hundreds of the little shits, every one a looming security time bomb. Most of them I cannot delete. I've just stopped making them now, which locks me out of pretty much every new product, but I consider it worthwhile in exchange for not creating more accounts.
There are better ways of doing this shit though. For example, firefox hello does not require an account like skype does. It just makes a hyperlink with a unique ID, and I can share it.
If you need to track the customers transaction, why not link it to a unique URL?
"Want to save your work? Create an account."
Creating an account can use FB/Google, or local login.
First demonstrate value, and people will gladly save their work.
Their new homepage looks to push you to sign up first though. There is still a link to "Unclaimed points > Sign up to claim your points" in the top nav.
They significantly increased their revenue by simply allowing customers to purchase without having to create account.
So removing this would cost them a great deal of money.
Fortunately, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. For example, price comparison websites (I built, ran and sold one) need nothing of the sort, it's just a mediocre marketing tool (your users are much better at recommending your product than you are!).
That said, having implemented this I can see why many services don't. It's an entire other case to consider when thinking about security, user experience, etc. and for many it could definitely be more trouble than it's worth. It's just a question of values if you make it a priority or not.
I chuckled at that, since my bank limits passwords to exactly 6 alphanumeric characters.
* It's a single place for a compromise to occur - the devastation of a serious identity provider hack completely upends the security of huge swaths of the internet in a single shot
* Breaks in fedauth protocols and implementations, similarly, presents a large auth crisis for the entire Web
* It's a single place for legal or extralegal pressure for governments to access services and data on behalf of everyone
* It creates market friction. If federated login had been around in large numbers when Myspace was the big social platform we'd still be using Myspace for the sheer reason we need it to vouch for our identity. It makes the big fedauth players 'too important to fail'
One should consider options carefully and determine whether a good user experience can be offered without further centralizing the Web.
Our checkout process requires no existing account, so you click on the buy button, enter your name, email address and billing info, and you create a password at the end, after which you DO have an account. We feel that this is much better UX than most other ticketing sites that send you to registration forms before you can continue the checkout.
We used to receive many, many support requests from people who'd lost the email containing their tickets. We then added order history and the ability to download their tickets by logging into their accounts and this resulted in a massive drop in support emails.
Another key point is that most people realise they've lost the ticket email only a few hours before the event is about to start, so we get very panicky last-minute emails from people freaking out that they're not going to be able to get in. Just giving people the option to log into an account and retrieve their tickets not only dramatically reduces our workload but also provides them with peace of mind.
We're adding 3rd-party login shortly (primarily Facebook) but will keep email/password as an option. However, even with 3rd-party login, we'll still need to confirm the email address as most people are used to email as their delivery method.
Saying all this, most of the advice in the article is valid and we follow many of the points. Our username is the email address and we enforce HTTPS on all pages (with HSTS headers).
"Losing email" is a problem completely distinct from the UX question. Since "losing email" is more-or-less impossible in year 2015, it isn't a reason to force people to make accounts. There are other ways to deal with this problem.
Actually losing email is basically impossible but non-technical people still do it all the time. What they mean is that they can't find the email they are after. "I am not good at searching" is indistinguishable from "the email is gone".
See what I did there?
Are readers of this piece supposed to follow the advice, like sheep, simply because they are told to? Or because they will get more usage? Or because it will make the world a better place? Or some other reason? We can only guess.