Saturday, April 14, 2018

Making the user login again after registration


Is it a bad idea to automatically login a user after their registration was flawlessly completed? A majority of all the websites I visit does not use this behavior, which is the reason for my question:



Is there any reason why a user should manually login after creating a new account at a site?



Answer



There are 2 reasons I can think of:



  • Confirming an email address before letting them in.

  • Making it slightly easier for a new user to set up their autofill username + password while their password is fresh in their mind.


If you don't care about their email address, then I would log them straight in. See reddit's sign up process, for example.


There are better alternatives if you want to confirm an email address:


Alternative 1:




  • Have the new user enter only their email address when signing up

  • Email them a link to sign in (which takes them right in, doesn't prompt for any details) together with a temporary password in case they can't use the link.

  • Have them set a new password and complete whatever profile details you require, giving them an option at the same time to remember their login (i.e., set a cookie)


Alternative 2:


Even better, allow them to sign up with a Google/Facebook/Yahoo/etc. account, a la StackExchange.


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...