In a recent article, Jared Spool explained How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million. The button in question, was changing a ‘Register’ link on an eCommerce site, to a ‘Continue’ one, allowing users to purchase without registering.
I have to say I’m amazed it makes such a difference, but then I’m someone who would always – given the chance – register, in order to speed up future purchases.
One other surprising issue brought to light, was the amount of duplicate registrations form people with various email addresses – 45% of all users had multiple accounts. Now a part of me wonders if a degree of these might be deliberate to abuse a first-time-buyer offer. I’ll shamefully put my hand up to abusing Amazon’s refer-a-friend discount in my early teens and must have had at least a dozen accounts just for that purpose.
However, if they are simply down to people not keeping track of which email address they’ve used, perhaps this adds support to the argument of using usernames rather than email addresses for logins. I’ve always designed logins to use email addresses on the assumption that everyone knows and can remember their email address, and if they haven’t registered then it will always be available, whereas your preferred username may be long gone. I always thought this was one less thing to remember but perhaps not.
Now I think about it, I do have a preferred username that I use almost everywhere, but have changed my primary email address a few times over the years. So might registering with a username – and providing a ‘forgotten username’ send-to-email link – be better? Though of course you still have to check each mail account you can think of til you find it…
I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on usernames vs email address as login IDs. The only thing we can probably all agree on is that they’re better than numeric auto-generated IDs which remarkably some sites still use!
Pete
Hi Pete,
Nice writeup.
The site didn’t offer any “new customer” incentives, so that wasn’t why people were creating multiple accounts.
The main reason we discovered was that people just couldn’t remember the username/password combinations. Since, for security purposes, it didn’t tell you which was wrong, you had no clue if you just couldn’t remember the password or if you had the wrong email address.
If you had the wrong email address, then the recover-your-password functionality wouldn’t work (because it sent it to the wrong address). If you had the right address, it was still a hassle to retrieve your password. Creating a new account was easier no matter what, so people did.
Where they go into serious trouble was the folks who tried to create new accounts, but the system wouldn’t let them because the email address was already in use. In many cases, those customers just took their business elsewhere instead of trying to figure it out.
Jared
Thanks for the reply Jared; as a new blogger it’s nice to know somebody has actually read my comments!
I do wonder how critical a security measure it is to not reveal whether it’s the email or password that’s incorrect. Personally I think the trade-off of a slight edge in security against decreased usability just isn’t worth it, but I suppose that depends entirely on the nature of the application at hand.
As for trying to register with an existing email address, the problem seems that this is normally treated as an input error – ie the form reloads with a big error at the top – much as it would had you missed out a mandatory field. What would make more sense is to acknowledge the source of the problem is as you mention and rather than going straight back to the form, give them the option of sending a password reminder to that email address with a single click, and allow you to resume checkout once you’ve logged back in.
Pete
I’d like to know what platform was used that allowed people to purchase without registering.