from Hacker News

Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

by rfelix2121 on 5/3/21, 1:01 AM with 209 comments

• by jillesvangurp on 5/3/21, 9:41 AM

  A couple of frequent mistakes with signin which are usually caused by junior product owners/ux persons not reflecting on what they are doing and blindly copying what they believe is the way to do things.

  - Having confusing language and poor differentiation between the sign in and sign up form. Symptom, users start filling in the wrong form only to realize their mistake.

  - Separating the password from the email field with an extra mouse click sucks if you are using a password manager. Doubly so on mobile where using password managers involve a bit of fiddly interactions. Having to do this twice sucks. If you do this, at least have one of the fields in the dom tree but hidden so that it gets filled with one click via your password manager.

  - Not making the login form password manager friendly my not sticking to conventions for field names for this.

• by young_unixer on 5/3/21, 8:08 AM

  Discord is bad at this.

  When you receive an invitation to a server, you're presented with a textbox that reads "What should everyone call you?" and you're unknowingly creating a new account. Then you're asked your birth date and then for your email. You type your email and it's already used, obviously.

  By this point you don't want to go through the whole process of deleting your browser history to log into your existing account, so you go along with the new account thing and use another email address.

  Before you know it, you have 5 different accounts and don't remember which ones you use for which servers.

  Yes, there is a "use existing account" link, but it's not prominent, the "What should everyone call you?" textbox with the big "Continue" button are the only psychologically viable option unless you've already gone through the whole process of involuntarily creating many accounts.

• by epistasis on 5/3/21, 2:16 PM

  I'm about ready to unsubscribe from the LA Times for this BS. They seemingly invalidate my login every day, then when I get linked to an article, a huge pop-up obscures the article while reading it, and despite paying them for this damn service I can never even find a way to login.

  And if you do this to people just because their cookie went stale, then is this really a customer that you want to remind that they don't use your service enough? A customer that is happy paying the bill every month but doesn't use a ton of resources?

  It reeks of really bad optimization of metrics: do everything possible to increase conversions, at any cost to the rest of the business. That sort of desperation is not good for retention.

• by blntechie on 5/3/21, 5:57 AM

  This is so common nowadays that for many sites I have the direct login page bookmarked. It indirectly implies that once you sign-up, the company stops caring about you. At-least for me.

• by hellotomyrars on 5/3/21, 5:38 AM

  Semi-related:

  The trend of the not having a log in button and only a sign up button, requiring multiple clicks just to login. I get that less friction for a new user is better being the thinking but I truly hate having to go through multiple pages just to sign in.

  What happened to having sign in/sign up being on the same page? Seems the simple and easy, as well as lowest friction way of splitting the difference between new and existing users.

• by mhdhn on 5/3/21, 5:24 AM

  I personally definitely agree with "Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website", since I find that so annoying. I've come to expect this annoying behavior especially from Y Combinator companies, ever since I read Paul Graham opining that companies should actually emphasize the trial/test-drive button, and deemphasize the sign-in button. He said that's what Viaweb did, and they thought it made better business sense. I just now tried a bit finding the essay where he states this, but I gave up. Maybe someone here will offer it.

• by smcl on 5/3/21, 10:27 AM

  Would it not be better if they found a different way to differentiate between the "Sign In" and "Try it FREE" buttons altogether? By using that cookie approach they've just introduced some inconsistency that may not be clear to users - e.g. you're on a different device (or an in-private window, or you cleared your cookies, or on a browser you don't normally use, etc) and you click the highlighted button and it takes you to a sign-up form instead of a login prompt.

  While they say "Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button...", they've implemented "Sometimes make customers hunt for the Sign In button..." which is arguably worse. It's good that someone else has identified this as a problem (it's annoyed me for a while) I just don't think this solution knocks it out of the park.

• by sen on 5/3/21, 5:32 AM

  This is becoming more and more common with major sites, and it’s really bloody annoying. Some are putting “Sign In” behind some tiny dropdown in the nav, not just grayed out or small but invisible unless you hunt for it.

  They know exactly why they’re doing though, and I think OP is preaching to the converted. Those doing this don’t need a tutorial explaining how not to do it, they need to lose money (users) until they stop doing these dark patterns.

• by ogre_codes on 5/3/21, 5:21 PM

  Why not just put the login in the top bar.

  I’m not sure why a site would recommend making an extra click easier when it’s not necessary at all. If someone has ever logged into your site, they should get a login page so they don’t have to do some extra tap. This is triply true if your site is frustratingly slow to load.

  Also:

  Support password managers. Your damned custom login page BS might be cute in design but sucks for usability. If your site doesn’t work reasonably well with a password manager I won’t come back. US Bank lost my business this way recently.

  Related: Have sane password requirements and limits. If my password manager gives you a 32 character password, don’t bitch because it doesn’t contain a number or uppercase character. It’s 32 characters long and unguessable, that should be enough. Also... if you fail because there is an underscore or ampersand, you’ve failed.

• by Softcadbury on 5/3/21, 6:54 AM

  It's even worse when they use terms sign in and sign up, like Github! English is not my native language and it always confuses me.

• by hcarvalhoalves on 5/3/21, 1:40 PM

  I swear, designers and developers are un-learning how to build sites. Things that used to Just Work on the web (sign in, scrolling, load speed, etc.) now merit an article.

• by hparadiz on 5/3/21, 5:55 AM

  This is what happens when everything is metrics based. Your paying customers pay the price. This happened with Loggly when solar winds bought them. We no longer use Loggly.

• by FriedrichN on 5/3/21, 9:46 AM

  I think changing the button styles based on cookies is not a good thing either, it just adds a new kind of confusion. Just keep the style consistent, give the login and sign up buttons a clear distinct style and keep it that way.

• by donatj on 5/3/21, 6:01 AM

  Plex’s responsive design hides it at the bottom of their hamburger menu in super low contrast gray-on-darker-gray text when your window is less than maybe 900px. It’s literally like they’re trying to hide it.

  I keep my windows in a grid and I end up just making my window wider because it’s easier than using their god forsaken hamburger menu.

• by tluyben2 on 5/3/21, 7:13 AM

  I was wondering if I was going blind for a while, staring seconds at websites trying to find where to login. Now I do what 'the computer illiterate' have apparently done for years; never go to the sites themselves, just put 'DigitalOcean login' etc in the addressbar (duckduckgo(or google)) and there you are.

• by fossuser on 5/3/21, 4:09 PM

  This kind of thing really bothers me - it's like a symbol for how little they care about existing users.

  I feel like there should be some specific name for this kind of thing - design patterns that target new users and suck for existing users. Honeymoon feature?

  'First hit is always free' feature? Maybe just 'First hit'? I'm bad at naming.

  ---

  "As they approached the city they could see enormous walls surrounding it. Jonathan noticed a guard standing near the entrance to the city. The guard was shouting, “Sign Up! Sign Up! Sign Up!” and then more quietly, “or Log In.”"

  https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

• by wruza on 5/3/21, 9:31 AM

  Another annoyance is when you can’t access their landing page until logging out (like visiting example.com redirects or just hyperscripts you into the dashboard if a session cookie exists). You log out, look for the info and then search for a login div again, where you have to spend another minute differentiating between the “bring on”, “chime in”, “lay along”, “sing in”, “growl at”, “give up” and other low-contrast cretinisms in place where explicit login and register links should be.

• by kingsuper20 on 5/3/21, 3:01 PM

  You know, that's an odd thing. Pre-hoi polloi internet, there was an awful lot of push for interface standards on PC/workstation/Mac software. After the gold rush occurs, practically everyone's webpage displays the kinks of the developers or some toolkit. From a user's standpoint, there's not much value-added here.

• by nickjj on 5/3/21, 10:25 AM

  I'm surprised so many folks are saying DigitalOcean is bad at this in the comments.

  Their home page on a desktop has 2 equally sized sign in and sign up buttons in the top right. The sign up button is filled and the sign in button is outlined. In mobile view it's pretty bad, they still show both buttons side by side but they're buried under a hundred miles of product links.

  Besides the buttons being pushed so far down on mobile, is that design really hard to find the sign in link -- specifically on desktop?

  Interestingly enough Stripe has only a sign in button in their nav bar https://stripe.com/ for non-logged in potential customers. I just checked with an incognito window. I guess they determined users who sign up mostly come from the main area of their home page or through another page reached from their nav menu (products, use cases, etc.), not so much from a sign up button near the sign in button.

• by cek on 5/3/21, 5:02 PM

  Kindel's 2nd Law – Companies with a subscriptions-based business model eventually behave in ways hostile to that company's customers.[1]

  [1] https://ceklog.kindel.com/2019/07/30/kindels-2nd-law/

• by musicale on 5/3/21, 7:08 AM

  Github hid their sign-in button and added annoying animations.

  Why, github, why?!

• by blunte on 5/3/21, 9:46 AM

  Don't make customer hunt for anything on your website.

  Prioritize features (ideally based on studying user behavior), and make those features present and accessible. Hide the rest, if necessary, behind some menu system or toggle.

  The minimalism trend (perhaps a reaction to the early amazingly busy Amazon UI?) has gone too far. One great (bad) example of this is Parabol.co. We use it at my company, and it provides just the right set of features we need. But for providing a relatively small feature set, it seems to go out of its way to make it difficult to know how to use those features. I only mention them because they are a good example of this, but there are countless other services that have user hostile (or frustrating) interfaces.

• by usrusr on 5/3/21, 8:45 AM

  A tiny button is far from the worst: try logging into your paid account on the mobile website of a service that not only has a free tier but also an app! (I'm looking at you, Strava)

• by ed25519FUUU on 5/3/21, 3:48 PM

  I just decided to stop pursuing a home loan with a company because of a few anti patterns like this. The first was there was actually no “log in” button whatsoever. You have to click “create an account”, and _then_ there’s a log in link.

  The second, more fatal anti pattern is not allowing paste in the password field. There’s simply no way I’m going to memorize random 30-digit password for your website. (I had to use dev tools to actually paste the password). Even though the APR was good we moved on.

• by croisillon on 5/3/21, 10:44 AM

  My pet peve are paid services only showing the limited-promotion-price, a discount is nice of course but I want to know how much that will cost me in the long run.

• by cosmotic on 5/4/21, 4:15 AM

  I don't understand; the article says don't hide it, then the article shows a sign in link that uses a dark-pattern non-button sign in link next to a button. Visually I would have missed the sign in link until I took a second or even third look. The UI that changes based on some practically random variable (the cookie being present) is disorienting.

• by pypie on 5/3/21, 1:04 PM

  This drives me nuts. It feels the same as the insurance company's phone menu asking if you're interested in purchasing a policy or submitting a claim, where the former choice get you an instant human being and the latter a 45 minute wait. In other words, it signals that you're more interested in signing up new customers than serving your current customers.

• by csours on 5/3/21, 3:04 PM

  Fitbit does something related - the url for your tracking dashboard is just fitbit.com, but when you go to fitbit.com, it's just the frontpage of the website; until you log in, and then navigate to your dashboard again.

  This makes it very clear that 1: fitbit wants me to use the app, and 2: fitbit wants to sell me stuff more than they want to help me.

• by jFriedensreich on 5/3/21, 9:50 AM

  also please call it "log in" and "sign up" not "sign in", don't make users work to use your products, buttons starting with the same word are slower to parse.

• by spookyuser on 5/3/21, 12:32 PM

  https://headspace.com/ is such a good example of this, login button is in probably the worst possible place on the page. And to make it even worse your login sessions are invalidated almost every day so you _have_ to login every time you use the website.

• by jarek83 on 5/4/21, 3:53 PM

  A bit out of topic: the OP mentions using Tailwind.

  I've peeked into the dev tools to see how Tailwind is used there. And since I'm advocating against using Tailwind, this page seems to be a perfect example what problems it brings to the table. Plenty of elements had to use custom classes to randomly overwrite some Tailwind classes here and there (like .display-3 and .main-headline) or completely avoiding Tailwind, like for the #recovered-revenue-main.

  It just shows that Tailwind did not solve issues it was claiming to solve, at least in this project. And I guess it must be a pain to maintain this project since PR reviewer and other coworkers now have to know Tailwind by heart to figure out quickly what really got overwritten and why.

• by tailsdog on 5/3/21, 9:10 AM

  Irony is there is no "Sign In" button or link on this page. I have to hunt for it by clicking the Logo to get to get back to the homepage.

  I know it is a blog but still it's part of the website and as a customer I should be able to access "Sign In" with one click from any page, right?

• by zackkrida on 5/3/21, 2:24 PM

  Totally agree with the diagnosis of the problem but not the solution. I don't think switching the color is good UX—if I know the top of the page has a big green button', I'm not going to expect that button to have conditional behavior.

• by stunt on 5/3/21, 2:12 PM

  Another one:

  SaaS websites, don't make visitors hunt for what the hell the service does.

  It's somehow hard for many SaaS websites to clearly explain what their service does. I often have to dig into multiple pages to figure out what the service does.

• by MiddleEndian on 5/3/21, 3:11 PM

  For my game site, I didn't want people to have to deal with passwords. I first tried to use google/facebook signon, but I found the code to be annoying to maintain (google and fb would change their APIs on a whim and really obscure the location of their settings for reasons unknown) and even my friends would rather not use those services. At some point I decided instead to just automatically sign people in and give them auto-generated usernames.

  https://www.miscbeef.com/birdcrab

  (blatant self-promotion)

• by zero_deg_kevin on 5/3/21, 4:37 PM

  I find it hilarious that this article is on a SaaS site's blog and has no sign-in button. Maybe I missed the "why this doesn't apply to this site" portion of TFA, though.

• by holler on 5/3/21, 6:23 AM

  For https://sqwok.im, I explicitly placed the login/signup prominently at top right for all users on mobile and desktop because I want it to be clearly visible always. I could see some value in detecting whether the user has already created an account and highlighting the "login" portion like the author has.

  There’s a business service site I have to log into once a month who’ve hidden the login behind a drop down and it’s really annoying!

• by globular-toast on 5/3/21, 12:30 PM

  I hate this so much. They've all copied each other to the extent that having a hidden sign in button is requirement for a "modern" site.

  Back in the day it was the other way around. Sign in was primary and sign up was secondary (often accompanied by something like "don't have an account? Sign up"). You just know some busybody UX person saw that and argued this was bad for new members. Well now you've just screwed it up in the opposite direction. Well done.

• by SLWW on 5/3/21, 4:39 PM

  This is about the most agreeable HN post I've seen in months. WHY? Why do they do this? Why does every single "new" and "cutting-edge" idea has a website that takes me more then 30 seconds (absolute worst case) to find the very thing I need to login?

  Why do companies like Twilio make me put my email in first and hit the arrow before i can even type in my password? (it confuses me and the password manager) and adds at least 5 seconds to the login process.

  I ask... why?

• by ethanoler on 5/3/21, 1:27 PM

  I am a UIUX product designer, and this was left intentional.

  The idea is that benefit of having a better CTA for SIGNUP far outweighs the friction/cost for the obscure SIGNIN.

  Existing Users can also be trained and conditioned to look for the sign in. They will not get away since they are existing customer (SaaS).

  However, once a prospective new lead bounces out, most likely they will not convert anymore (counting remarkerting aside)

• by AlchemistCamp on 5/3/21, 5:40 AM

  Digital Ocean has this problem.

• by jarek83 on 5/4/21, 3:40 PM

  This looks like very bad idea to make a page looking different for users based on their cookies. When user comes to this page from different laptop, he will get confused since the highlighted button won't be the "Sign in" anymore as he got used to. I guess Sign In and Sign Up should be distinctively different all the time.

• by poisonborz on 5/3/21, 6:00 AM

  I also noticed this trend, but I don't understand the reasons, the site also doesn't explain it. Wouldn't it be beneficial to capture (and potentially track) existing users earlier? What's good in annoying them? Why are dominant sign in/register buttons mutually exclusive? What became of the trend of the reverse - large sign-in with a later option to register?

• by jasfi on 5/3/21, 6:06 AM

  Could the problem be "don't make me hunt for the x button"? After all, not every button can be highlighted.

• by baybal2 on 5/3/21, 1:42 PM

  I just started to notice... some websites change places of sign up, and sign in buttons.

  Who in the world came up with this?

• by darkwater on 5/3/21, 6:16 AM

  And this can be easily solvable by swapping the Sign up for Sign In after the first time you logged in a browser cookiejar. Obviously the devil is in the details, but it shouldn't be that complex having a visible Sign Up for potential new users and a visible Sign In for existing users...

• by Arhaan on 5/3/21, 4:15 PM

  Semi related, ClickUp does have a signup button right in front of you but they always log me out between sessions. It's a great app, but it's irritating when you have to login each day, especially since it is meant to be used everyday.

• by cpcallen on 5/3/21, 10:12 PM

  For a while it was the case that Mailchimp.com did not have a login button on their homepage at all. To log in I would have to use the link sent to me by the colleague who managed our account.

• by metalman on 5/3/21, 12:01 PM

  Frustration is one of or the primary drivers in the purchase and use of computers. "Getting them to do anything at all,makes us overlook there fundimental uselessness" Douglas Adams

• by dreamcompiler on 5/3/21, 1:34 PM

  Isn't this the direct result of startup incentive structures? Don't startups measure success more in "number of conversions" than "number of return visits"?

• by alpaca128 on 5/3/21, 10:21 AM

  Also, if you're running an online shop please don't put the "order as guest" option on the "register" page without any hint.

• by jeffreyrogers on 5/3/21, 3:18 PM

  Some services make the register button easy to find but you have to hunt for the sign in button. Paying customers matter as much as prospective ones!

• by hnarn on 5/3/21, 9:04 AM

  The first time I encountered this was Dropbox. It honestly made me re-think using them at all, and these days I mostly use OneDrive.

• by joshxyz on 5/3/21, 6:50 AM

  Fucking digitalocean.com geez

• by stadium on 5/3/21, 5:57 AM

  And the sign out button too!

• by thepra on 5/3/21, 9:33 AM

  I make it more explicit than anything >_> https://quick.collanon.app

• by PaywallBuster on 5/3/21, 5:16 AM

  AWS and recently Cloudflare too

• by fnord77 on 5/3/21, 11:22 AM

  sites that seem desperate to add new users do this.

• by solipsism on 5/3/21, 5:14 AM

  Literally never had this problem.