One thing I hate doing is signing up for new accounts. You may have felt this way before, too. You come to a new site for the first time and want to check out what they do and if it can help you. Before you get too far you’re redirected to a page, not with functionality, but with yet another registration form. I don’t know about you, but this is sometimes terribly off-putting for me (especially depending on the mood I’m in).
Glimpse of a better way
I use Flickr to share my photos online. When I was first investigating this I naturally assumed I would need to fill out a lengthy registration form. To my delight, Flickr (a Yahoo! property by this point) just let me log in with my Yahoo! account, like I do on other Yahoo! network sites. This was, for me, a huge improvement, but it only solved the problem inside one company.
Enter the failed experiment
Smart bloggers put their heads together to solve this problem. “A ha!” they thought, “We all have blogs, let’s just use our web addresses as logins!” This was and is a great solution for bloggers, but a lot of people just don’t have a blog or primary website, or find it clunky to type that everywhere.
Until recently, we also had this form of login prominently displayed on our login page. This has sometimes been downright confusing to people. “Why is there a box for a website address under the username and password section on the login page?” they would ask. Worse yet, sometimes people typed in the wrong box by mistake, and the system tried to log them in with an address that did not exist.
Enter the redesign
Using the power of a new open standard, OpenID 2.0, and using lessons learned from a lot of recent research on this topic, we decided to try improving the user experience of the PostRank login form. No longer are there three boxes, but only the two that you’re used to. This is good for people who have “traditional” PostRank accounts, because you just fill in your email address and password like usual, and off you go. No extra boxes or anything.
People who want to try using an account they have elsewhere will find that experience has also been improved. Entering an email address from a provider supporting OpenID 2.0 (such as Yahoo!, Google, or AOL) with no password will let you log in with your account from that provider. If you’re one of those bloggers with an OpenID-enabled blog (such as blogger.com users) you can enter your blog address in the Email address or OpenID field, and login that way. There is a drop-down if you click on the OpenID logo to display some of the most common providers.
Yahoo! and Google users may also now click on the Sign in with Yahoo! or Sign in with Google buttons in the right pane of the login page.
If you decide you want a local password anyway
Not a problem! If you login using an account from another service and later want to set a local password as well, just head over to the password recovery page and enter your email address.
Hopefully this new design will result in an easier experience for all.