Ditching Facebook Login — ‘coz echo users said so

For all those who are new to echo (old friends kindly ignore) -

echo is your friendly neighbourhood social planning app. It’s got a simple mission — to help you and your friends have fun. To know more, give the app a spin.

Back to what this article is REALLY about ;)

Since echo is your real world social app, for you to be able to use it effectively, you’ll want to have pretty much all your friends use it too. How else are you going to plan all your fun outings?

So we @echo thought, lets put in a Facebook login — this takes care of one thing for us — a new user can see her Facebook friends who are on the echo app.

In theory this makes perfect sense, however, our users didn’t think so. We @echo promise to listen to our users, be it — user interviews, feedback, surveys or reviews. Our users were concerned about privacy, and some just did not want to link their Facebook profiles.

So the echo team had one of our famous brainstorming sessions. (Not)

It was simple, if our users were not happy, we were not happy and in a week’s time, we pushed out a mobile number + OTP sign up method. We have still retained an the option to fetch some details from Facebook for people who thought it more convenient.

Although, migrating a sign up process is not as easy. All our existing users will now have to volunteer their mobile numbers, and we’re really hoping they can find a few friends using their phone contacts.

The journey does not end here, we will continue talking to our users and gather feedback on what they think about this. Who knows what the next round will bring us.

Till then, adios.

p.s If you like what you read, here is something else I’ve written about echo (heads-up, its way longer) :)