UIEtips: Account Sign-in – 8 Design Mistakes to Avoid

There’s nothing that’s as ubiquitous on the web as account sign-in. Do it wrong and the user is frustrated and you may have permanently lost them. Do it right and you can turn a visitor into a long-term customer. Few things can be as important as having user accounts.

Our goal with account registration and sign-in features is to enhance the user’s experience, yet often we end up creating user experience problems. With all the experience designers have, it’s still difficult to create a good sign-in and registration process.

We try to setup a process that’s user friendly for our customers and users but unusable for the people that want to steal our identities and disrupt our environment. It’s difficult to create a design geared for one subset of users and not geared for everyone.

This week, we’re revisiting an article I first published a year ago, Account Sign-up: 8 Mistakes to Avoid. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this should serve as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

Has your design suffered from these mistakes? What have you done to avoid them? Join the conversation below: