

How a Shortcoming of the English Language Doomed Two Decades of Web Design - Mizza
http://gun.io/blog/how-a-shortcoming-of-the-english-language-doomed-two-decades-of-web-design/

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jmillikin

      > If we want to associate their account with a username,
      > we can already deduce that from the email address -
      > simply take everything before the '@'.
    

The concept of a "username" as a special entity is long obsolete.

If accounts are uniquely identified by an email address, let users sign in
with their email address. If users object to showing their address publicly,
add a free-form text field so they can tell you which name they want to use.

    
    
      > We're a quickly growing young startup - we really just
      > want as many interested people to enroll as possible.
      > If we have to slightly uglify our 'settings' page or
      > burn a bit of energy on support for the percentage of
      > users who don't want to use their email address name
      > as their username, we can manage that.
    

The problem is that you're not just spending your own mental energy, you're
spending that of every other person who signs up. You're forcing every
registree to think of, type in, and remember another string if they want to
use your site.

    
    
      > What do you think? Have you seen any better examples
      > in the wild? Do you have any better ideas that I
      > haven't addressed here? As a user, how would you
      > prefer to approach this problem? 
    

IMO, the best login form supports OpenID, OAuth, and nothing else. Put up a
couple big buttons up for the major providers (Facebook, Yahoo, Google, AOL,
etc), plus the generic OpenID logo to handle any alpha-nerds.

Then the registration flow takes two steps (click button, click "yes send my
info", user is signed in), and the re-login flow takes only one (click button,
user is signed in). The user doesn't have to fill out a form, or remember a
new password, or wait for a validation email to arrive.

~~~
geon
> If users object to showing their address publicly, add a free-form text
> field so they can tell you which name they want to use.

Although I mostly like it, there is a potential identity theft security issue
with that approach. Anyone could pick "jmillikin" (or your email address if
you have chosen to display that) as the display name.

It is usually possible to set any image as an avatar, so this point might be
moot anyway.

------
geon
"Use Websitename"

