Single sign in means just that
Are you really doing your audience a favour if you’re offering them a dozen login or signup options? I don’t think so.
In fact, I think you’re doing folks a dis-service. Single sign on or oAuth should be precisely that, one means of signing in or up to any service using just one service.
Pay a visit to Behance for example, and you’ll see just how many ways you could join or sign in. We’re failing our users by including every oAuth service in the book.
The theory goes that your users can use just one service (Facebook, Google, Twitter et al) to sign up an sign in to every other service on the planet. That’s open authentication or oAuth.
Great idea, all I need to remember is my one login and bobs your Facebook chum. So when I come back to Behance, and I don’t remember which service I used to signup, what do I do now? Unless I used the same email address for each of my social accounts, and research shows many folks don’t, we’re all a bit stuck and I will either have to accept I’ve got multiple accounts and I’ve lost any settings I had made or I’ll just go off and do something else.
Looks like most of us are guilty of a bad interpretation and misguided implementation of this very simple and potentially friction free means of universal login.
I suggest best practice when introducing an oAuth service is to decide who your demographic is and which service is the one you are going to implement — don’t just lazily implement them all. Grow a pair and be decisive, are your users twitterholics or Facebook fanatics? I’m guessing they’re 80/20 one way or the other.
