Today I’m going to talk a little about GoldenLine.pl, a polish social network, one of the biggest on our market. I needed to create an account there recently, and came across their registration & login process. Registration was standard and pretty painless. The interesting things started when I needed to login for the first time.
Here’s how the login form looks like:
Interesting, isn’t it? The very first question that came into my mind is what’s the default action? Signing up? It should be signing in as majority of users are ones who have the account. Something like this:
I noticed this, as I made a mistake the first time I was signing in. The second time I did it the “right” way, but it isn’t the case. User should not adapt to the service’s interface. This is interface role to guide user by using right information visualization (like using right colors to highlight more likely actions).
The second thing: they should use the information entered in the login form to check if user have an account even if he or she clicks “Sign Up”. This is because user may forget about having an account in the system or they clicked a wrong button. If user doesn’t have it, then move to the sign up form, but with some fields already filled in (like email).
Good systems already implement such preemptive approach (see Pragmatic Programmers as an example).
Right now I’m going to ask GoldenLine.pl what they are going to do with this. Stay tuned.
