Spool on Sign-In Design

Jared Spool writes in a recent article, “Designing an account registration and sign-in process that doesn’t frustrate users turns out to be very difficult to achieve. It looks easy at the outset, but a pile of subtleties can sneak up on your experience, making something that should be simple become stressful for the users.” He’s right; something that should be so easy is so easy to get wrong. Here’s a summary of Spool’s “8 Design Mistakes to Avoid” for account sign-in, along with a few of my own observations:

For more discussion and examples, see the full article . Also see Aaron Cannon’s post on the impact captchas could have on disabled users as part of a sign-in process.

Also see Spool’s follow-up article with 8 more sign-in design mistakes.

posted by Ted Boren on Friday, Jan 04, 2008
tagged with usability, security, sign-in, passwords