Design vs Art Blog

Login process should be extremely easy as this is they way users will get into the personalized content of your website. Many users get tired and leave if they try to login a few times and they can not get into the website. Specially new users leave and don’t come back.

Avoid unnecessary information or distractions. 9rules, the social content network, tells users that the password will be emailed when the are at the login page. This is confusing as usually sites don’t send emails during the login process.

Making a mistake introducing the username or password takes users to the signup page. In this particular case, this is really bad as no error message or password recovery link are displayed. If you want to improve usability and your general web design, I would recommend, first to nicely tell the user that there was a mistake, and after that give an easy way to solve the problem (in this example would be a “try again” or “recover login info”)

Popularity: 6% [?]

It’s good to give users a kick way of login into your website. Make your login input box or link visible, usually users look for it on the top right corner of the website. Like, for example, Photobucket.

On the other side, a bad design example could be Safari Books Online, an online book database. It’s so annoying to me that they don’t have a login box in the homepage! Instead they have a “Subscribe” link. Tricky, eh?

Today I had to look for the registration email to get the link they sent me to search books. Safari was obviously not thinking in the user but in the potential customer when they designed their homepage. Already registered users have to remember to go to the subdomain search.safaribooksonline.com in order to actually use the service they are paying for.

Popularity: 13% [?]