​​UX Patterns

Breaking Down the UX of Switching Accounts in Web Apps

One of the most overlooked UX challenges is how to handle allowing a user to switch accounts. I know this because I’ve designed for it a dozen times and it snuck up on me each time. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twelve times, write a Medium article about it!

What do I mean by switching accounts?

For today’s software and applications, you no longer install it via install disk and instead must sign up for an account. I can’t think of the last app I used that did not require a login. But this then creates challenges for those apps that allow you to have multiple accounts because they need to determine how they want to allow people to switch accounts (if at all).

Switching accounts takes on a few different forms (which I’ll detail in the next section):

• Admin: this is the simplest case where an application has some functionality that is available only to a user with a particular set of permissions. You’ll find this in just about every B2B SaaS application because someone has to control the key settings in the application for others.
• Business-Personal: For some applications, there is a need to support multiple accounts but separate between personal and business use. In these cases, there is little need…