15 ms·

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

439 points by rfelix2121 5y ago

solipsism 5y ago
Literally never had this problem.
PaywallBuster 5y ago
AWS and recently Cloudflare too
- scarface74 5y ago
  As an AWS consultant, I work with a lot of client companies and I’m often watching a screen share while they are navigating through the console. I haven’t seen one yet that actually logs in to AWS directly and not use some type of SSO solution.
mhdhn 5y ago
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.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Is it this? https://mixergy.com/paul-graham-design/ https://mixergy.com/paul-graham-design/ Kind of along those lines.
sen 5y ago
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.
- mkl 5y ago
  I don't understand. Why is it to their advantage to have their users struggle to log in?
  - bartread 5y ago
    They probably have metrics suggesting that having both sign up and sign in buttons on the page leads to lower sign up rates than having only a sign up button, or something along those lines. Rather than find a more in depth/better designed solution, it's easier just to remove the "sign in" button and any "confusion" that might cause for users who would otherwise complete the sign up workflow. If their A/B testing indicates that removing the button improves sign up rates, that's exactly what they'll do. It's super-annoying and short-sighted - not to mention lazy - but this kind of micro/over-optimisation of behaviour on the web has been de rigeur for at least a decade now. A better approach would be to try to understand why "confusion" around sign up/sign in is happening - i.e., what's the real reason having both buttons/links on a page decreases sign up rate? Root cause the issue and you can fix the real problem in a way that probably doesn't annoy your customers. That's effort though and most customers probably don't care enough to complain about the annoyance of hunting around for a sign in button or link.
hellotomyrars 5y ago
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.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I'm sure UX research shows that the login button is seldom used on a particular site, therefore not that important. Why seldom used? Because you stay logged in for a long time. Is UX bull on this issue? Maybe, but if you are logged in for a long time, and then you come to log in when you've been logged out, it might be that you accept the lousy experience on this issue because you actually want to use the site... all that said I wouldn't care if the UX research suggested it was a good move. I wouldn't do it (on anything I owned, I would just argue against it if asked to implement it)
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    UX research also shows that one of the most important things is consistency. Internal consistency as well as consistency with other websites the user is familiar with. 99% of sites don't have so many features and sections that they'd need to omit some of them from the landing page. But for some reason they think replacing UI elements with screen-filling fancy animations and a lot of empty space inbetween is somehow a good thing. I never saw any upside in this. I have a short attention span and am easily distracted, and modern UI trends are catastrophic from my perspective. I don't care about a fancy "hero area", just give me a menu bar that stays in the same place and gets me anywhere I need.
- fireattack 5y ago
  Seriously. I honestly don't mind to have "sign up" being more prominent, but see very little reason why they go further and hide login button..
- 5y ago
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
Digital Ocean has this problem.
- memco 5y ago
  GitHub is one that gets me often.
  - dewey 5y ago
    What's the problem? They have both "Sign in" and "Sign up" next to each other. Same color, opacity and the only difference being that there's a border around "Sign up".
    - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
      On mobile, the sign in link is hidden behind a hamburger menu.
      - memco 5y ago
        Yes, that's what gets me.
- joshxyz 5y ago
  Fuck yea i love them but this is ANNOYING lol
- alias_neo 5y ago
  Yep, even worse on mobile. You have to open the hamburger menu and then scroll 4+ screen heights down (on a OnePlus 8 Pro) just to find "Login".
- mewpmewp2 5y ago
  I remember the same, but funnily enough, it seems to be fixed now, with both "Sign in" and "Sign up" buttons available on the top right. I don't remember how it was before, but I always started to create a new account instead of logging in.
hparadiz 5y ago
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.
stadium 5y ago
And the sign out button too!
blntechie 5y ago
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.
- philosopher1234 5y ago
  It implies that because it’s literally true. Not a complete loss of care, but it makes sense to hide the sign in button because users who are already signed up are already invested, and less likely to abandon the service. The front pages main job is to grow the company by attracting new users, and a sign in button for users who aren’t going anywhere anyways gets in the way of that.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Inconveniencing either current or prospective customers never ‘makes sense’. It’s not like you have a fixed amount of inconvenience you have to distribute.
    - philosopher1234 5y ago
      You have a fixed amount of screen real estate on the landing page. Distributing it to your most important users for that page (prospective users) does make sense to me.
      - kemotep 5y ago
        Is the solution presented in the blog to utilize a cookie to determine if someone is a prospective user versus already a user not an acceptable compromise? It seems rather straightforward to me, from their example, to de-emphasize the "Sign Up" button and prioritize the "Sign In" button for someone who already has an account.
        philosopher1234 5y ago
        That seems like a good strategy to me. It raises the question though, is it worth the cost of maintaining a separate page?
poisonborz 5y ago
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?
- JoshuaDavid 5y ago
  My cynical guess is that when companies A/B test this, they find that a clear sign-in button reduces the number of new sign ups (because if the sign-in button is hard to find, some existing users will create a new account). A/B testing is great but it's very easy to optimize for something that's easy to measure rather than what you fundamentally care about.
donatj 5y ago
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.
- smilespray 5y ago
  This is one of several reasons why I would never consider paying for Plex Pass again. The other reasons include spending a LOT of resources on rolling out features I imagine few users are likely to be interested in, such as DVR.
  - donatj 5y ago
    I wouldn’t go that far. I subscribe to Plex Pass happily mostly to support financially a service I adore and use daily. Features I don’t use don’t hurt me and they give you the option to disable things you don’t use. The login button is just hard to find on the homepage.
jasfi 5y ago
Could the problem be "don't make me hunt for the x button"? After all, not every button can be highlighted.
- ajmadesc 5y ago
  No lol. For services, Try me, login, sign up. Three buttons. Not that hard
  - jasfi 5y ago
    That could be worse. Login is the better choice if you've already signed up, but trial is the better choice if you're new. If a user doesn't sign up, they'll never login.
darkwater 5y ago
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...
- johntash 5y ago
  This could make it even more annoying imo. Sometimes the sign up button is the first thing you see, and then other times its the sign in button. You'd end up clicking on one or the other out of habit and realizing it was the wrong thing afterwards. If I'm signing in, there's a good chance there is no cookie saying I have ever signed in.
- imhoguy 5y ago
  Please don't! The worst thing is to swap meaning of a button at exactly same placement. If you are forced to do it then at least change background color and add some icon etc. But nothing can beat MS Teams "Close" document preview button, which once clicked, uncovers chat "Call" button. Add some laggy nature of Teams and you call the entire channel/chat just by trying to close an opened document with too many clicks.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    But that would not change "immediately". Basically if you never logged in (in that browser) you see the "Sign up" more prominently and once you registered, you are already logged in (so you don't see anything at all) but if you do log out, then you would see the "Log In" clearly (and the "Sign up" will be somewhere also but not in the best spot).
holler 5y ago
For https://sqwok.im 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!
- mattmanser 5y ago
  Your site is really slow. I honestly thought it was broken when I first went, no login link to be seen at all. This is why you should avoid making a SPA unless you know what you're doing, if you're going to use one at least put a spinner or something so it's clear the site's doing something.
  - holler 5y ago
    > This is why you should avoid making a SPA unless you know what you're doing The site doesn't have much traffic right now and is running entirely on serverless lambda, it's likely you arrived while it was idle and had to wait for it to wake up... > at least put a spinner or something so it's clear the site's doing something def should improve the loading state for when it hasn't woken up yet.
- jjgreen 5y ago
  No login link, just a series of grey lines, even after I enable javascript. Ah, I see you require that I accept cookies just to to view your front-page ...
  - holler 5y ago
    Yeah this site requires javascript to use and it uses cookies... It may load slowly if there's no traffic, see below.
joshxyz 5y ago
Fucking digitalocean.com geez
Softcadbury 5y ago
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.
- XargonEnder 5y ago
  English is my native language and this annoys me because it slows me down
- Tade0 5y ago
  Yeah, what ever happened to Create account/Register and Log in? Why have two very different options with almost the same label?
  - Kwpolska 5y ago
    Heh, there was a time when Microsoft’s Polish translators (who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise) decided “Sign in” should be translated as „Zarejestruj”. Which is what everyone else called the “new account” button. They managed to fix it since then to a much more reasonable and much less confusing „Zaloguj się”.
    - Tade0 5y ago
      Oh, I remember that incident. Since then I've become suspicious of any translations from English to Polish. Especially given that I have some insider knowledge on how large publishers translate tech books and the way they do it is, in one word, awful.
    - garaetjjte 5y ago
      >who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise I think Windows translators are real humans, because quality is much better than whatever Bing Translator spits out (seriously, who thought it was good idea to automatically redirect to Bing-translated MSDN pages), but translated completely without any context. For example, task manager now have RAM "Form factor" translated as "Współczynnik postaci"...
    - 5y ago
musicale 5y ago
Github hid their sign-in button and added annoying animations. Why, github, why?!
- pupdogg 5y ago
  This pisses the hell out of me becuase, due to my privacy settings, I end up on their homepage a lot. Evidence just for records: https://imgur.com/a/HfF9vUJ https://imgur.com/a/HfF9vUJ
tluyben2 5y ago
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.
- notdang 5y ago
  And if you don't have an adblocker installed, the first 5 results will be adds which will get you to the home page, not the login page. At least in this case you make them pay for it.
young_unixer 5y ago
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.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  Unless I'm mistaken, Slack actually forces this as part of their model: one account per organisation. It's not fun when you have to reset passwords...
  - Twisell 5y ago
    I had to create a Slack account to interact with a vendor support team. Run into that mess and can't for the love of god find a "manage all your accounts" interface on Slack. It's insanely counter-intuitive. I'll avoid Slack as much as possible unless they fix this evil UX.
  - Larrikin 5y ago
    The design does work very well with a password manager though.
- anilakar 5y ago
  And when you access the site directly, you are always shown the front page which is basically a full-screen ad and serves no other purpose than user conversion. Furthermore, the sign-up link literally says "Open Discord in your browser" which can be read as "go to the app". Ideally there was one single email address field and a combined sign up / sign in button that either took you to the password or new account creation dialog. If you're concerned about privacy implications, do realize that user signup forms leak the very same information.
usrusr 5y ago
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)
hnarn 5y ago
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.
tailsdog 5y ago
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?
wruza 5y ago
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.
thepra 5y ago
I make it more explicit than anything >_> https://quick.collanon.app https://quick.collanon.app
- alvarlagerlof 5y ago
  Your website takes a lot of time to load
  - hactually 5y ago
    Wow... Yeah, gave up at 26 seconds. Ooft.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
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.
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  > - Separating the password from the email field This is useful if you support authentication methods other than password > - Not making the login form password manager friendly my not sticking to conventions for field names for this Instead of relying on heuristics based on field names, it's also possible to annotate the field with the autocomplete attribute https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/autocomplete https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
  - kkirsche 5y ago
    You can still separate them and have a hidden password field for a password manager to bypass the other page or pass it through to the next page.
    - numbsafari 5y ago
      1Password manages to handle this just fine, even without the hidden password field trick. Perhaps we just need better password managers.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
FriedrichN 5y ago
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.
blunte 5y ago
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.
jFriedensreich 5y ago
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.
alpaca128 5y ago
Also, if you're running an online shop please don't put the "order as guest" option on the "register" page without any hint.
nickjj 5y ago
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/ 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.
- batch12 5y ago
  I actually thought of DigitalOcean first when I saw the title of the article. I somehow always end up clicking sign up instead of sign in.
- thomasahle 5y ago
  If you shrink the website to half your screen width, the "Sign In" button goes away, and there is only "Sign Up". You can get to "Sign In" by clicking the burger menu and scroll sufficiently far down, or by searching. You can't find it by simply searching on the front page, or by just clicking the burger menu. I guess that's what people mean by "having to go hunting for the sign in button".
  - nickjj 5y ago
    > If you shrink the website to half your screen width, the "Sign In" button goes away, and there is only "Sign Up". Interesting, I don't see that here. I wonder if they're A / B testing layouts and my IP is locked into a specific choice. If I open the page in Chrome or Firefox I see both buttons side by side and then if I slowly make the window smaller (starting at 2560 width btw), it eventually gets to the point where both buttons disappear inside of the hamburger menu when the buttons get too close to the left nav. The sign up button is never visible on its own. Which browser do you use?
smcl 5y ago
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.
croisillon 5y ago
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.
fnord77 5y ago
sites that seem desperate to add new users do this.
metalman 5y ago
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
globular-toast 5y ago
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.
spookyuser 5y ago
https://headspace.com/ 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.
pypie 5y ago
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.
- Forge36 5y ago
  I'm working on switching insurances this month. 18+ months of being unable to pay online. If they don't want my money and competitors are cheaper why am I debugging their website to get passed all of their JS errors?
- musicale 5y ago
  > 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 Insurance (in my experience at least) seems like this astonishing scam where they collect premiums for years and then as soon as you try to collect on a claim they refuse to pay and cancel your policy.
ethanoler 5y ago
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)
dreamcompiler 5y ago
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"?
hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
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.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Every new generation has to either learn from the past or reinvent from scratch. The web has always had lots of cargo-cult copying of processes, because the most influential sites always get copied in order to try to be more familiar. And with the overwhelming complexity of current front end web tech, it seems there's not much time left to put into thoughtful user experience.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  It’s less about un-learning and more about the entire market changing, compromised by seemingly-endless VC money that rewards growth and “engagement” more than actual profits derived from value delivered to users. Nowadays a large chunk of online services’ objective is more to “engage” you and sign you up to some bullshit newsletter or sales call rather than actually provide you a service that you’d be happy to pay for. Marketing has become the primary objective, with “deliver value to the user” a neglected side-effect.
  - hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
    See, I believe this is not a good enough argument. This would be the same as excusing falling bridges and crashing planes on whoever's money speaking louder. If the people who actually _build_ anything – the actual developers, engineers, etc. – don't build things up to standard or can't manage executive expectations, there's no hope; we'll live in a capitalocracy ruled by MBAs. People building things need to care about the crap they ship because they'll have to use it too. There's way too many people in the industry not caring, just happy to collect a paycheck.
baybal2 5y ago
I just started to notice... some websites change places of sign up, and sign in buttons. Who in the world came up with this?
stunt 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 5y ago
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.
- omarhaneef 5y ago
  Are you linking from within Facebook or Twitter? I think they have their own mini browser so your logging in outside doesn't count inside.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Twitter or other chat apps or web-based link aggregators, but not Facebook. When in an app on mobile, I usually launch the native web browser from the Twitter browser. I almost wonder if some of the link parameters log me out some times...
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    That’s another one. Shipping an In-App browser should be punishable by 20 years of only browsing the internet via Pinterest.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  >I'm about ready to unsubscribe from the LA Times for this BS. At this point, I just naturally assume that newspaper websites are unusable. They certainly give ad-blockers a workout. Once you get through all the cruft candy I especially like the paywalls with the several second delays.
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  > They seemingly invalidate my login every day I don’t get it either, this is why I stopped reading the LA Times (I should probably cancel my subscription). On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I logged into NYTimes, it just works (that’s why I read it daily).
zackkrida 5y ago
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.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  I think the solution has a more fundamental flaw. Reasons why people are no longer logged in: 1. The website timed them out. 2. They pressed “log out.” 3. They/their browser deleted their cookies. 4. They are on a different device. 5. They are in private/incognito mode in a new tab or window (say after clicking a link to confirm their email address at signup). To the extent the solution works at all it only works for (1) and (2).
kingsuper20 5y ago
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.
csours 5y ago
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.
MiddleEndian 5y ago
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 https://www.miscbeef.com/birdcrab (blatant self-promotion)
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
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!
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
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.
fossuser 5y ago
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.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  That seems to be the way modern business works. Entice new customers with great offers and then neglect existing customers while milking them for money. Cable is like that. Cell phone plans are like that. With my car insurance it was the same. They raised rates every year so after 15 years I switched companies and now I am paying half the premiums. Even companies are like that with employees. New people are getting big raises for joining and people already there are getting 1% raises per year. It seems loyalty is for suckers these days. It used to be that long time customers and employees got rewarded. Now they are being punished and exploited.
Arhaan 5y ago
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.
zero_deg_kevin 5y ago
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.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Their blog has no sign-in button. Their main page (https://stunning.co/ https://stunning.co/) does.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    That is super common because most blogs are running on a separate platform like Medium compared to the main site.
SLWW 5y ago
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?
- saddestcatever 5y ago
  > Why do companies like Twilio make me put my email in first and hit the arrow before i can even type in my password? Because of lazy UX implementations of SSO. You'll see logins like Google, where this is common. If you submit an email that has an SSO authentication associated with it, they can redirect you to the right auth form. However, for everyone that's not an SSO login this is a worse experience.
- bb101 5y ago
  I've noticed this for years, and always wondered "Why?" myself. Then I came across a UX blog where the author suggested doing exactly this. Their reasoning being that new users aren't familiar with your website, so they need a big garish button to help them sign up easily, whereas regular users are familiar with your website already so they will know where the Login link resides. I don't agree with it personally, I think it reflects an organization where marketing is prioritised over customer happiness.
cek 5y ago
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/ https://ceklog.kindel.com/2019/07/30/kindels-2nd-law/
ogre_codes 5y ago
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.
cpcallen 5y ago
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.
cosmotic 5y ago
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.
jarek83 5y ago
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.
jarek83 5y ago
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.

439 points by rfelix2121 5y ago

solipsism 5y ago

Literally never had this problem.

PaywallBuster 5y ago

AWS and recently Cloudflare too

scarface74 5y ago
As an AWS consultant, I work with a lot of client companies and I’m often watching a screen share while they are navigating through the console. I haven’t seen one yet that actually logs in to AWS directly and not use some type of SSO solution.

mhdhn 5y ago

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.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Is it this? https://mixergy.com/paul-graham-design/ https://mixergy.com/paul-graham-design/ Kind of along those lines.

sen 5y ago

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.

mkl 5y ago
I don't understand. Why is it to their advantage to have their users struggle to log in?
- bartread 5y ago
  They probably have metrics suggesting that having both sign up and sign in buttons on the page leads to lower sign up rates than having only a sign up button, or something along those lines. Rather than find a more in depth/better designed solution, it's easier just to remove the "sign in" button and any "confusion" that might cause for users who would otherwise complete the sign up workflow. If their A/B testing indicates that removing the button improves sign up rates, that's exactly what they'll do. It's super-annoying and short-sighted - not to mention lazy - but this kind of micro/over-optimisation of behaviour on the web has been de rigeur for at least a decade now. A better approach would be to try to understand why "confusion" around sign up/sign in is happening - i.e., what's the real reason having both buttons/links on a page decreases sign up rate? Root cause the issue and you can fix the real problem in a way that probably doesn't annoy your customers. That's effort though and most customers probably don't care enough to complain about the annoyance of hunting around for a sign in button or link.

hellotomyrars 5y ago

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.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I'm sure UX research shows that the login button is seldom used on a particular site, therefore not that important. Why seldom used? Because you stay logged in for a long time. Is UX bull on this issue? Maybe, but if you are logged in for a long time, and then you come to log in when you've been logged out, it might be that you accept the lousy experience on this issue because you actually want to use the site... all that said I wouldn't care if the UX research suggested it was a good move. I wouldn't do it (on anything I owned, I would just argue against it if asked to implement it)
- alpaca128 5y ago
  UX research also shows that one of the most important things is consistency. Internal consistency as well as consistency with other websites the user is familiar with. 99% of sites don't have so many features and sections that they'd need to omit some of them from the landing page. But for some reason they think replacing UI elements with screen-filling fancy animations and a lot of empty space inbetween is somehow a good thing. I never saw any upside in this. I have a short attention span and am easily distracted, and modern UI trends are catastrophic from my perspective. I don't care about a fancy "hero area", just give me a menu bar that stays in the same place and gets me anywhere I need.
fireattack 5y ago
Seriously. I honestly don't mind to have "sign up" being more prominent, but see very little reason why they go further and hide login button..
5y ago

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

Digital Ocean has this problem.

memco 5y ago
GitHub is one that gets me often.
- dewey 5y ago
  What's the problem? They have both "Sign in" and "Sign up" next to each other. Same color, opacity and the only difference being that there's a border around "Sign up".
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    On mobile, the sign in link is hidden behind a hamburger menu.
    - memco 5y ago
      Yes, that's what gets me.
joshxyz 5y ago
Fuck yea i love them but this is ANNOYING lol
alias_neo 5y ago
Yep, even worse on mobile. You have to open the hamburger menu and then scroll 4+ screen heights down (on a OnePlus 8 Pro) just to find "Login".
mewpmewp2 5y ago
I remember the same, but funnily enough, it seems to be fixed now, with both "Sign in" and "Sign up" buttons available on the top right. I don't remember how it was before, but I always started to create a new account instead of logging in.

hparadiz 5y ago

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.

stadium 5y ago

And the sign out button too!

blntechie 5y ago

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.

philosopher1234 5y ago
It implies that because it’s literally true. Not a complete loss of care, but it makes sense to hide the sign in button because users who are already signed up are already invested, and less likely to abandon the service. The front pages main job is to grow the company by attracting new users, and a sign in button for users who aren’t going anywhere anyways gets in the way of that.
- simonh 5y ago
  Inconveniencing either current or prospective customers never ‘makes sense’. It’s not like you have a fixed amount of inconvenience you have to distribute.
  - philosopher1234 5y ago
    You have a fixed amount of screen real estate on the landing page. Distributing it to your most important users for that page (prospective users) does make sense to me.
    - kemotep 5y ago
      Is the solution presented in the blog to utilize a cookie to determine if someone is a prospective user versus already a user not an acceptable compromise? It seems rather straightforward to me, from their example, to de-emphasize the "Sign Up" button and prioritize the "Sign In" button for someone who already has an account.
      - philosopher1234 5y ago
        That seems like a good strategy to me. It raises the question though, is it worth the cost of maintaining a separate page?

poisonborz 5y ago

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?

JoshuaDavid 5y ago
My cynical guess is that when companies A/B test this, they find that a clear sign-in button reduces the number of new sign ups (because if the sign-in button is hard to find, some existing users will create a new account). A/B testing is great but it's very easy to optimize for something that's easy to measure rather than what you fundamentally care about.

donatj 5y ago

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.

smilespray 5y ago
This is one of several reasons why I would never consider paying for Plex Pass again. The other reasons include spending a LOT of resources on rolling out features I imagine few users are likely to be interested in, such as DVR.
- donatj 5y ago
  I wouldn’t go that far. I subscribe to Plex Pass happily mostly to support financially a service I adore and use daily. Features I don’t use don’t hurt me and they give you the option to disable things you don’t use. The login button is just hard to find on the homepage.

jasfi 5y ago

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

ajmadesc 5y ago
No lol. For services, Try me, login, sign up. Three buttons. Not that hard
- jasfi 5y ago
  That could be worse. Login is the better choice if you've already signed up, but trial is the better choice if you're new. If a user doesn't sign up, they'll never login.

darkwater 5y ago

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...

johntash 5y ago
This could make it even more annoying imo. Sometimes the sign up button is the first thing you see, and then other times its the sign in button. You'd end up clicking on one or the other out of habit and realizing it was the wrong thing afterwards. If I'm signing in, there's a good chance there is no cookie saying I have ever signed in.
imhoguy 5y ago
Please don't! The worst thing is to swap meaning of a button at exactly same placement. If you are forced to do it then at least change background color and add some icon etc. But nothing can beat MS Teams "Close" document preview button, which once clicked, uncovers chat "Call" button. Add some laggy nature of Teams and you call the entire channel/chat just by trying to close an opened document with too many clicks.
- darkwater 5y ago
  But that would not change "immediately". Basically if you never logged in (in that browser) you see the "Sign up" more prominently and once you registered, you are already logged in (so you don't see anything at all) but if you do log out, then you would see the "Log In" clearly (and the "Sign up" will be somewhere also but not in the best spot).

holler 5y ago

For https://sqwok.im 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!

mattmanser 5y ago
Your site is really slow. I honestly thought it was broken when I first went, no login link to be seen at all. This is why you should avoid making a SPA unless you know what you're doing, if you're going to use one at least put a spinner or something so it's clear the site's doing something.
- holler 5y ago
  > This is why you should avoid making a SPA unless you know what you're doing The site doesn't have much traffic right now and is running entirely on serverless lambda, it's likely you arrived while it was idle and had to wait for it to wake up... > at least put a spinner or something so it's clear the site's doing something def should improve the loading state for when it hasn't woken up yet.
jjgreen 5y ago
No login link, just a series of grey lines, even after I enable javascript. Ah, I see you require that I accept cookies just to to view your front-page ...
- holler 5y ago
  Yeah this site requires javascript to use and it uses cookies... It may load slowly if there's no traffic, see below.

joshxyz 5y ago

Fucking digitalocean.com geez

Softcadbury 5y ago

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.

XargonEnder 5y ago
English is my native language and this annoys me because it slows me down
Tade0 5y ago
Yeah, what ever happened to Create account/Register and Log in? Why have two very different options with almost the same label?
- Kwpolska 5y ago
  Heh, there was a time when Microsoft’s Polish translators (who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise) decided “Sign in” should be translated as „Zarejestruj”. Which is what everyone else called the “new account” button. They managed to fix it since then to a much more reasonable and much less confusing „Zaloguj się”.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    Oh, I remember that incident. Since then I've become suspicious of any translations from English to Polish. Especially given that I have some insider knowledge on how large publishers translate tech books and the way they do it is, in one word, awful.
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    >who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise I think Windows translators are real humans, because quality is much better than whatever Bing Translator spits out (seriously, who thought it was good idea to automatically redirect to Bing-translated MSDN pages), but translated completely without any context. For example, task manager now have RAM "Form factor" translated as "Współczynnik postaci"...
  - 5y ago

musicale 5y ago

Github hid their sign-in button and added annoying animations. Why, github, why?!

pupdogg 5y ago
This pisses the hell out of me becuase, due to my privacy settings, I end up on their homepage a lot. Evidence just for records: https://imgur.com/a/HfF9vUJ https://imgur.com/a/HfF9vUJ

tluyben2 5y ago

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.

notdang 5y ago
And if you don't have an adblocker installed, the first 5 results will be adds which will get you to the home page, not the login page. At least in this case you make them pay for it.

young_unixer 5y ago

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.

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
Unless I'm mistaken, Slack actually forces this as part of their model: one account per organisation. It's not fun when you have to reset passwords...
- Twisell 5y ago
  I had to create a Slack account to interact with a vendor support team. Run into that mess and can't for the love of god find a "manage all your accounts" interface on Slack. It's insanely counter-intuitive. I'll avoid Slack as much as possible unless they fix this evil UX.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  The design does work very well with a password manager though.
anilakar 5y ago
And when you access the site directly, you are always shown the front page which is basically a full-screen ad and serves no other purpose than user conversion. Furthermore, the sign-up link literally says "Open Discord in your browser" which can be read as "go to the app". Ideally there was one single email address field and a combined sign up / sign in button that either took you to the password or new account creation dialog. If you're concerned about privacy implications, do realize that user signup forms leak the very same information.

usrusr 5y ago

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)

hnarn 5y ago

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.

tailsdog 5y ago

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?

wruza 5y ago

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.

thepra 5y ago

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

alvarlagerlof 5y ago
Your website takes a lot of time to load
- hactually 5y ago
  Wow... Yeah, gave up at 26 seconds. Ooft.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

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.

CodesInChaos 5y ago
> - Separating the password from the email field This is useful if you support authentication methods other than password > - Not making the login form password manager friendly my not sticking to conventions for field names for this Instead of relying on heuristics based on field names, it's also possible to annotate the field with the autocomplete attribute https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/autocomplete https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
- kkirsche 5y ago
  You can still separate them and have a hidden password field for a password manager to bypass the other page or pass it through to the next page.
  - numbsafari 5y ago
    1Password manages to handle this just fine, even without the hidden password field trick. Perhaps we just need better password managers.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago

FriedrichN 5y ago

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.

blunte 5y ago

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.

jFriedensreich 5y ago

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.

alpaca128 5y ago

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

nickjj 5y ago

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/ 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.

batch12 5y ago
I actually thought of DigitalOcean first when I saw the title of the article. I somehow always end up clicking sign up instead of sign in.
thomasahle 5y ago
If you shrink the website to half your screen width, the "Sign In" button goes away, and there is only "Sign Up". You can get to "Sign In" by clicking the burger menu and scroll sufficiently far down, or by searching. You can't find it by simply searching on the front page, or by just clicking the burger menu. I guess that's what people mean by "having to go hunting for the sign in button".
- nickjj 5y ago
  > If you shrink the website to half your screen width, the "Sign In" button goes away, and there is only "Sign Up". Interesting, I don't see that here. I wonder if they're A / B testing layouts and my IP is locked into a specific choice. If I open the page in Chrome or Firefox I see both buttons side by side and then if I slowly make the window smaller (starting at 2560 width btw), it eventually gets to the point where both buttons disappear inside of the hamburger menu when the buttons get too close to the left nav. The sign up button is never visible on its own. Which browser do you use?

smcl 5y ago

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.

croisillon 5y ago

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.

fnord77 5y ago

sites that seem desperate to add new users do this.

metalman 5y ago

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

globular-toast 5y ago

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.

spookyuser 5y ago

https://headspace.com/ 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.

pypie 5y ago

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.

Forge36 5y ago
I'm working on switching insurances this month. 18+ months of being unable to pay online. If they don't want my money and competitors are cheaper why am I debugging their website to get passed all of their JS errors?
musicale 5y ago
> 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 Insurance (in my experience at least) seems like this astonishing scam where they collect premiums for years and then as soon as you try to collect on a claim they refuse to pay and cancel your policy.

ethanoler 5y ago

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)

dreamcompiler 5y ago

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"?

hcarvalhoalves 5y ago

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.

epistasis 5y ago
Every new generation has to either learn from the past or reinvent from scratch. The web has always had lots of cargo-cult copying of processes, because the most influential sites always get copied in order to try to be more familiar. And with the overwhelming complexity of current front end web tech, it seems there's not much time left to put into thoughtful user experience.
Nextgrid 5y ago
It’s less about un-learning and more about the entire market changing, compromised by seemingly-endless VC money that rewards growth and “engagement” more than actual profits derived from value delivered to users. Nowadays a large chunk of online services’ objective is more to “engage” you and sign you up to some bullshit newsletter or sales call rather than actually provide you a service that you’d be happy to pay for. Marketing has become the primary objective, with “deliver value to the user” a neglected side-effect.
- hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
  See, I believe this is not a good enough argument. This would be the same as excusing falling bridges and crashing planes on whoever's money speaking louder. If the people who actually _build_ anything – the actual developers, engineers, etc. – don't build things up to standard or can't manage executive expectations, there's no hope; we'll live in a capitalocracy ruled by MBAs. People building things need to care about the crap they ship because they'll have to use it too. There's way too many people in the industry not caring, just happy to collect a paycheck.

baybal2 5y ago

I just started to notice... some websites change places of sign up, and sign in buttons. Who in the world came up with this?

stunt 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

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epistasis 5y ago

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.

omarhaneef 5y ago
Are you linking from within Facebook or Twitter? I think they have their own mini browser so your logging in outside doesn't count inside.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Twitter or other chat apps or web-based link aggregators, but not Facebook. When in an app on mobile, I usually launch the native web browser from the Twitter browser. I almost wonder if some of the link parameters log me out some times...
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  That’s another one. Shipping an In-App browser should be punishable by 20 years of only browsing the internet via Pinterest.
kingsuper20 5y ago
>I'm about ready to unsubscribe from the LA Times for this BS. At this point, I just naturally assume that newspaper websites are unusable. They certainly give ad-blockers a workout. Once you get through all the cruft candy I especially like the paywalls with the several second delays.
vincentmarle 5y ago
> They seemingly invalidate my login every day I don’t get it either, this is why I stopped reading the LA Times (I should probably cancel my subscription). On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I logged into NYTimes, it just works (that’s why I read it daily).

zackkrida 5y ago

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.

cgriswald 5y ago
I think the solution has a more fundamental flaw. Reasons why people are no longer logged in: 1. The website timed them out. 2. They pressed “log out.” 3. They/their browser deleted their cookies. 4. They are on a different device. 5. They are in private/incognito mode in a new tab or window (say after clicking a link to confirm their email address at signup). To the extent the solution works at all it only works for (1) and (2).

kingsuper20 5y ago

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.

csours 5y ago

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.

MiddleEndian 5y ago

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 https://www.miscbeef.com/birdcrab (blatant self-promotion)

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

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!

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

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.

fossuser 5y ago

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

spaetzleesser 5y ago
That seems to be the way modern business works. Entice new customers with great offers and then neglect existing customers while milking them for money. Cable is like that. Cell phone plans are like that. With my car insurance it was the same. They raised rates every year so after 15 years I switched companies and now I am paying half the premiums. Even companies are like that with employees. New people are getting big raises for joining and people already there are getting 1% raises per year. It seems loyalty is for suckers these days. It used to be that long time customers and employees got rewarded. Now they are being punished and exploited.

Arhaan 5y ago

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.

zero_deg_kevin 5y ago

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.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
Their blog has no sign-in button. Their main page (https://stunning.co/ https://stunning.co/) does.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  That is super common because most blogs are running on a separate platform like Medium compared to the main site.

SLWW 5y ago

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?

saddestcatever 5y ago
> Why do companies like Twilio make me put my email in first and hit the arrow before i can even type in my password? Because of lazy UX implementations of SSO. You'll see logins like Google, where this is common. If you submit an email that has an SSO authentication associated with it, they can redirect you to the right auth form. However, for everyone that's not an SSO login this is a worse experience.
bb101 5y ago
I've noticed this for years, and always wondered "Why?" myself. Then I came across a UX blog where the author suggested doing exactly this. Their reasoning being that new users aren't familiar with your website, so they need a big garish button to help them sign up easily, whereas regular users are familiar with your website already so they will know where the Login link resides. I don't agree with it personally, I think it reflects an organization where marketing is prioritised over customer happiness.

cek 5y ago

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

ogre_codes 5y ago

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.

cpcallen 5y ago

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.

cosmotic 5y ago

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.

jarek83 5y ago

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.

jarek83 5y ago

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.