The Death of the Login
How Anonymous Customization and Notifications are killing it
The login wall was a necessary evil that users had to live with. Most often users were forced to login and in return were promised customization and personalization. The internet companies got email addresses so that they can reach out to the user about various promotions, releases, features etc. It was the classic “we all win” proposition.
But, at the end of the day, the login wall is one of the most hated UX elements in the history of web/mobile development. This leads to huge drop off rates when users are presented with the login wall. If you are developing a brand new product that only you and your mom know about, throwing a login wall that prevents the user from making progress will result in a lot of drop offs.
Why we don’t need logins anymore — at least most of the time
The primary use cases for requiring a login are providing security , customization, multi-device sync and being able to reach out to the user. Lets explore each of these concepts and how the advent of mobile is making it possible for an alternate, less intrusive experience.
I also want to use the app that we are developing, the yogatailor app, as a case study to show how we are looking at each of these concepts. The yogatailor app is like lumosity for yoga, it asks the user a few questions about what they want, and it creates customized yoga video programs for the user. After that, it adapts the programs based on the user’s progress or lack thereof. With that out of the way, lets jump in.
Customization
By having the user login, we could keep track of their usage and create a personalized experience. We see classic examples of this on Netflix, Amazon, Medium and many others. A common login on multiple computer and devices made sure that the user activity across all of them was tracked.
With the advent of mobile first and mobile dominant behavior of the user, this paradigm is losing relevance. The mobile smartphone/tablet is a personal computing device, much more personal than the personal computer ever was. Our usage of an app on a mobile phone in essence remains forever within the app. This was not the case before when we used to access information and websites via the browser.
With the kind of information available within the app, the concept of “anonymous customization” is gaining popularity. A lot of newer apps do not insist on a login but are still able to provide a custom, personalized experience to the user based on their past behavior within the app.
With the yogatailor app, we have completely gotten rid of the login. The user specifies her settings and then they are all stored within the context of the app. There is some server side storage and it is unique to a particular device installation. Seen below is a flow diagram that we were working on and at some realized, the login screen is not needed! Our initials results show that more than 80% of the users are finishing the flow of selecting the options and watching at least one video. This, we think, will be much lower if we had a login wall at some point in between.
User communication
Another big reason was communication with the user. Getting the email was paramount to be able to communicate with the user. But, email open rates have plummeted in the recent past. Click rates are even worse. If you get a 5% click rate, you have a winner. 1–2% click rates are the norm. Source
Notifications FTW : Now, with the advent of push notifications, its much easier to communicate directly with the user. Note that we are not talking the stock “send em to all” push notifications. Sending global notifications that are not targeted and personalized for users is a recipe for disaster.
The solution is targeted and personalized notifications. Been a few days since you have come back to the app? You get a nice welcome back notification. Your trial membership is about to expire? You get a nice little reminder.
The user experience of notifications are also evolving. Android notifications are far ahead now, where a lot of functionality can be encapsulated within the notification. You can have all kinds of actions directly from the notification curtain. For example, in the screens below, the user gets a tweet and she can reply, retweet or favorite the tweet right from the notification curtain. This experience is so compelling that some developers argue that the concept of opening apps is transforming — http://blog.intercom.io/the-end-of-apps-as-we-know-them/
Note that with iOS8, notifications on the Apple platform have also become very powerful
We are working on making notifications very targeted on yogatailor. Below, you see an example of a targeted notification going to a user at 7PM local time reminding him that he has not scheduled the next video in the sequence. Why 7PM? That was the time the user did the previous video.
Multi-device support
Multi-device support is when users are using your app on multiple devices. Hence, they need the context to be transferred between the devices. For example, you probably check your email on the browser, on your smartphone and soon on your Apple Watch. For most apps, this is really an over-rated feature. At a previous media company, where we had more than 10MM MAUs, we did an analysis of how many users were truly on multiple devices ie. PC and iphone, iphone and ipad etc. We came out with a whopping 0.5% of the active user base. Having said that, if you definitely want to support this use case, you can still do without the infamous login. You can use anonymous token handshakes like how you connect your appleTV with your netflix account or how you connect your roku box to your ESPN account.
The way this works is that you go to a browser (on the computer or mobile device) and you login as usual to your account. You are prompted with a specific code. Within a certain time, you enter the code on your mobile device and voila, the accounts are hooked up.
To be frank, we haven’t dealt with this with yogatailor. We are still so young and limited in resources that we havent gotten to this yet.
Security
If your app is primarily focused on providing secure access to private data, it’s hard to workaround this. This is also an use case where the user does not mind logging in. For our app, this is nor super critical. But if you have an email app, banking app, social communication app.. you probably cannot avoid the login.
Does this mean the login is dead?
Of course not. Apps that create a social experience need logins. Apps where the users contribute and participate actively needs logins. Medium, Facebook, Quibb etc are examples of apps/websites where the identity of the user is important in order to be able to interact with other users. But for a large segment of apps that are “read only”, where the user is not contributing content and/or connecting with other users, I submit that forcing the user to login could be detrimental. With the advent of mobile as a personal device, it feels like we dont really need a login to provide a truly customized and personalized experience. This is what we are attempting with the yogatailor app .
I will keep you posted on how long we can resist the login.☺
Thanks to Rahul, Sandi, Sophie and Helena for reading the draft.
Ramesh Padala is a Mountain View based Entrepreneur. He is working on a confluence of technologies to help people live healthier and fuller lives. The first attempt at this is the yoga app : http://www.yogatailor.com/app
twitter: @rameshdot0
