[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why drive users away from the login button?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Why drive users away from the login button?
There's a trend to make login buttons less obvious/attractive than
signup/schedule a demo/etc buttons. To the point where some sites
will actively discourage login. Is this because the metrics driving
these sites are primarily user acquisition? Is this some UX trend I
missed? I would say that it could be that designers don't expect
people to ever log out, but many of these sites won't keep you
logged in anyway, so you need to sign in every time you use them.
Author : EamonnMR
Score : 17 points
Date : 2021-11-23 21:03 UTC (1 hours ago)
| ajford wrote:
| I always assumed it was the assumption that the user would be
| "remembered" by their auth token and that the user would be
| returning from an already auth'd device.
|
| When your UI team is testing user flows, if they're not starting
| from a fresh/clean session, they can fall into that pattern and
| forget to walk the "existing user, no auth" path.
|
| At a past employer we ran into that with regards to an
| Apple/Safari issue. It's been a while, but iirc it was something
| to do with scroll heights, modals, and a render engine update in
| Safari maybe 3-4 years ago. Nobody caught it during testing due
| to us using manual testing in a variety of browsers, and it was
| live for almost 3 weeks. It was annoying at normal use, but if
| you had fonts increased (i.e. eldery/vision impaired user) it
| meant the user would be unable to login.
|
| After that incident we switched to a hosted browser testing
| solution (I think it was BrowserStack, but might have been
| something else) and we made sure to flush things and test on
| multiple browsers per platform. I don't remember the full list
| anymore but it was something like 20 different
| browser/platform/version tests each.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Because marketing websites are made to convert and sell, it's
| like a colorful brochure for new visitors.
|
| Those that were already sold to and bought in to the product and
| value it provides, shouldn't use new visitor brochures to use the
| product.
| throw03172019 wrote:
| They optimize for sign up conversions.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| > _Is this because the metrics driving these sites are primarily
| user acquisition?_
|
| I believe it is the reason, and have read so (somewhere).
|
| Sometimes, it is worse on mobile where the login button
| disappears and you have to click on a "sandwich/menu" icon to
| display it; to this I say: guilty as charged. In this case, there
| are hundreds of other more pressing issues and we'll get to it.
| Maybe I'll change it later.
| kevindeasis wrote:
| It all depends on the product, designers, market, product owners,
| marketing team, and target audiences
|
| Some products would have different funnel for the lifecycle of
| their product. Sometimes it might make sense to do one thing for
| a specific funnel and might not on a different context.
|
| However, that assumes we are making decisions based on data.
|
| Sometimes a team / company can will make decisions even if it is
| not optimal in terms of conversations because that's what they
| feel like doing.
| Tepix wrote:
| As a user i hate this pattern but you do see it everywhere.
|
| The website is telling you they don't value returning customers,
| all they are about is new customers.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-23 23:02 UTC)