6 onboarding tips I use on UX of registration and authorization flow

Best practices I learned so far

Pavel Chelyuskin
Bootcamp
3 min readJul 17, 2023

--

User onboarding is a first step in digital product.

I had to spend up to 80% of my time designing onboarding scenarios, because a properly designed onboarding scenario is a key for the users activation.

One of the primary stages is registration and authorization. I have designed dozens of services, from startups to fintech services inside marketplaces, and I have often had to design registration and authorization scenarios from scratch.

Although all services have different security requirements and registration scenarios differ, I can share some tips that will help simplify the process for your users, avoid dead-end scenarios, and improve conversion.

Offer the user to enter their only email address first

If the user is new, offer them to register. If they are already registered, ask them to enter their password. Look at how this is implemented, for example, in Google.

Your welcome screen will be much cleaner with one input
Your welcome screen will be much cleaner with one input

It is surprising how many services still use different entry points for registration and authorization, as the user does not always remember whether they registered before or not. But the service always knows this.

So, your user flow will be like this:

When possible, use authorization buttons from other services

User analysis in one of our projects showed that buttons from Google, Facebook and Twitter cover 95% of users.

Third party sign-in buttons makes onboarding much easier
Third party sign-in buttons makes onboarding much easier

Do not make users come up with complex passwords (mandatory inclusion of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols)

If you use two-factor authentication or your service does not have sensitive data (passport data, bank card links, etc.). In such cases, it is usually sufficient to require a password of at least 8 characters.

Don’t torment users by creating overly complicated passwords
Don’t torment users by creating overly complicated passwords

If the user clicks “forgot password”, do not make them enter their email address again to reset it

Do not ask user enter email twice

If you use registration through third-party service buttons and the user tries to log in a new way (for example, manually enters an email address), simply ask them to authorise using the original method.

After that, you can ask the user to create a password so that they can use different methods for authorization.

If registration is via email and password, do not require immediate email confirmation.

Let the user start using the service and ask for email confirmation only when they want to use certain features of the service.

Let user to confirm their email later
Let user to confirm their email later

These tips will help make the registration and authorization process easier and more convenient for your users.

Please, feel free to leave comments if you have any thoughts about this onboarding tips.

--

--