Problem summary

You wish to know who the active user is in order to provide personalized content or opportunities to conduct a purchase.

Solution

Ask users to register an account in order to provide a personalized experience. Let users register an account to allow saving information with your service, provide a personalized experienced, or give access to limited resources.

Common design flaws for registration and sign-in features include:

• Visibility: make sure the “Sign-in” and “Sign-Up” buttons” are clear, easy to see and easy to access. Don’t hide the “Sign-in” button/form.
• Call to Action: Draw attention to crucial operations such as “Register new account” “Sign-in”, and “I forgot my password”. Ensure your action buttons are appealing and encourage new users to join.
• Nudge: Exploit sign-up opportunity at key locations, don’t just rely on one point of action.
• Redundancy: Provide plenty of “Sign-In” buttons at key locations. Users often wait to the last moment to sign in. Key locations are points of action; for instance when the user wants to add a comment to a blog post.
• Complicated: Don’t frustrate users with complicated password requirements. The strength of the password you require needs to match the need for protection. A password policy that is too strict can hinder sign-up and may discourage potential customers.

You can make your account registration easier on your users including:

• Provide a simple and understandable description of the requirements for usernames and passwords.
• Additionally, you might want to provide a password strength meter to provide instant feedback on how well the entered password meets the requirements instead of displaying an error message after the user has clicked the submit button.
• Similarly, you might also want to use AJAX to check for the availability of the username on every keystroke, so that the user does not need to submit the entire form several times before he is allowed entrance.
• When logging in, return to the page the user came from. If the point of action was submitting a comment to a blog post, redirect the user to the comment form after login.
• Consider incorporating a social sign in options such as “Facebook Login” into your website/application and avoid the entire new password paradigm entirely.

Rationale

Account registration enables personalized and contextual content to be presented to authenticated users.

Account registration allows for remembering details about the user; product wish lists, preferences, interests, shipping and billing addresses, VAT number for billing purposes, and more.

Benefits of letting the users register an account with your site include:

• You know who is using your system
• You know how often they visit
• You know what they do on your site.
• You can store information your users might need later, such as billing info or wish lists for future purchases.
• You can use account registration to reserve special content from your regular users.
• You can differentiate prices, information displayed, and access rights depending on who the logged in user is.