4 ms·
we only allow a user to be signed into either mobile or desktop at once to avoid even more excessive account sharing. I would perceive this to be hard broken i
by patio11 9y ago
we only allow a user to be signed into either mobile or desktop at once to avoid even more excessive account sharing.
I would perceive this to be hard broken if that happened to software which I or my employer was legitimately paying for.
Why don't you talk to users and figure out why the account sharing happens? Is it because they don't want to pay for more seats or is it organic behavior caused by the difficulty of the end-user _actually purchasing_ more seats, given how software is bought in their organization?
If you're going to log someone out, let _both_ sessions know that. "You've been signed out since you just signed in on Chrome from 123.45.XXX.XXX. Was this surprising to you? Click here to bug your account owner to purchase additional seats." (adjust copy to taste)
"Since you signed in, we automatically signed out your existing session on Firefox at 123.45.XXX.XXX."
(If you want to be really sneaky about it, open a chat window between the two sessions and give them ~90 seconds to come to an agreement about which should be signed out ;) Your desired outcome there is one of them says "Gah, boss, James signed me out again when I was filing TPS reports. I can't work in this environment! Figure it out!" or "Memo to all hands: if you kick our CFO out of a screen sharing session with the auditors again, update your resume.")
More broadly, I would generally suggest selling buckets of seats rather than strictly per-seat unless you're absolutely constrained by your market or your customers' headcount costs model (like e.g. CRM for sales reps or ticketing system for support agents, respectively). This makes it easier to add new users to the system most of the time, which is something you want to encourage. I'd also encourage you to look at how Slack does seat-counting; it's elegant, is user-friendly, and puts as few roadblocks as possible to capturing the business of everyone in the organization. (I bet their terms are different for true enterprise deals, though.)
P.S. If this isn't a huge issue for you I'd generally suggest removing the restrictions and ignoring it; there are likely higher points of leverage in the business. Stats will be your guide.