
Login vs Log In - mikegirouard
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/406016/ui-terminology-logon-vs-login
======
tb303
we tested this heavily at mint. the verdict was

sign in/sign out is clearest to the average (nontechnical, mass consumer)
user...

...but the problem is, so is "sign up." so when in conflict with a third "sign
_" action, the preferred and easily recognized choices are "log in," "log
out," and "sign up."

this is a generalization, but "log on" really only resonates with people who
had modems.

there you go.

~~~
moe
"Sign in" is terrible.

Use: "Login" for login. "Logout" for logout. "Sign up" or "Register" for
registration.

You don't want any ambiguity in your buttons. "Login" is internationally
understood, "Sign in" not so much (and takes more effort to visually
distinguish from "Sign up").

~~~
panacea
"Login" is terrible (and you should feel bad for suggesting bad UX as though
it was right).

Users want to provide their identity credentials to access your site and
verify who they are. They do that via an electronic signature which is their
username and password.

Therefore they want to "Sign In" with their signature.

The fact that you're 'logging' their signature is secondary to their needs.
And as far as making a compound word out of "log" and "in"... well that's
stupid (and wow... "Logout" is a new verb created just so you can leave a
website securely? Try explaining what that is to someone who has never used
the internet... 'no it's not street slang for going to the toilet').

As for your 'more effort to visually distinguish' between "Sign In" and "Sign
up", you already solved that problem. "Sign in" and "Register" are the
winners.

And we don't have to involve any lumps of wood (or new verbs that suggest
bowel movements).

Once you've registered your signature with the site, the next time you arrive,
you merely provide your signature. Register and then Sign In.

~~~
tb303
> "Login" is terrible (and you should feel bad for suggesting bad UX as though
> it was right).

seconded

I also agree that "register" is a great alternate to "sign up."

My original intent in responding to this thread is to help educate HN readers
between data and opinion when it comes to "good UX." As a designer I've had
opinions about these things for years, as we all have. But not all of us have
had the opportunity to test our ui lexicon in front of millions of users. So
while we might think "oh, register makes more sense," I am simply offering
that no, in fact, it did not. "Sign up" was the most commonly-expected term
for participating in the system as a non-user. "Register" was viewed as more
committal, technical, involved.

~~~
moe
Did you A/B test the conversion rate or is that from a poll?

~~~
tb303
passive: tested conversion/success rate

active: tested lexicon on focus groups, asked what users expected actions to
do, testing hypothetical affordances, etc.

~~~
moe
That's interesting. We did an extensive series of A/B tests a while back
between "Registrieren", "Anmelden" and a specific call to action (this was a
german top100 site). There was no significant difference between the former
two but, as expected, a much better conversion with the specific call.

However, none of this is relevant to the "Login" vs "Sign in" debate. If
_that_ button influences anything then it would be in the retention, and I
doubt the impact can be measured in insulation either way. It's merely one of
the tiny details that make a difference in aggregate.

------
entropy_
Stackoverflow sometimes annoy me in how aggressive some people can be at
closing questions. So this is a question that's 3 years old, where Jeff Atwood
himself weighed in. But somehow, just because it got a surge of popularity
recently it was closed 40 minutes ago.

~~~
bdg
Typically questions linked from a news aggregate site are closed because the
question is now a stage for people to shout "me too" without reading the other
posts. We end up with dozens of comments that haven't added any value to the
discussion. If one of my questions are linked, I request a mod lock it,
because it's damn annoying to have my inbox flooded with that kind of
feedback. Protected locks are removed after a short time, if you feel strongly
that you had a meaningful contribution to the post.

~~~
lloeki
This explains the _"protected by Charles 6 hours ago"_ , not the _"closed as
off topic by agf, Charles, marcog, leppie, MartinHN 1 hour ago"_.

~~~
jeltz
Yeah, protecting questions linked from news aggregators is fine and a sensible
thing to do. Closing the questions is not.

------
kristjan
Daily dose of irony for ya:
[https://img.skitch.com/20120716-kxcbgabsha7mi6nwxnd4w48wfw.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20120716-kxcbgabsha7mi6nwxnd4w48wfw.png)

------
zaptheimpaler
The title is wrong. The debate is about Login/Logon not Login vs Log in. Could
someone change it?

~~~
lukeschlather
Well, the question is about login/logon, but the poster misuses them, since
login/logon are not verbs.

~~~
subspaceman
That's what I noticed as well. Another misuse I see all the time is 'setup'
(noun) being used as a verb instead of 'set up'. For example, 'I need to setup
this computer today'

------
drewcoo
Is this honestly something "hackers" care about? German separable verbs,
maybe, but that's probably more of a signifier of the kind of education you
had than business viability or hacking anything even remotely useful.

Please downvote me if I missed the meat of what this was really supposed to be
about. I think maybe I just don't understand the HN community most of the
time.

Also "sign" vs "log" and "in" vs "on" are A/B testable.

~~~
timaelliott
Is making otherwise innocuous changes which have a substantial impact on user
behavior important to the startup culture?

No, no at all.

------
wahsd
What it made me think of is how silly the whole convention is.

From a back end, sure, log your access in or on and out of off. But from a
user perspective, why are we logging anything. Why do we need to sign a
metaphorical log sheet every time we come and go?

Is there no better way to do it? Are we destined to spend our lives and future
signing the log sheet at the metaphorical security desk for the rest of human
existence?

------
joshka
<http://notaverb.com/login>

~~~
haakon
I prefer <http://loginisnotaverb.com/>.

------
srik
I've thought about this for a considerable amount of time last month and
decided the simplest way to do it was to use Enter and Exit in our upcoming
sports app, because they have real world connotations and also have meanings
and symbols that are easy to get, even by utterly non tech savvy people. Hope
that doesn't end up introducing even more confusion.

~~~
tikhonj
Interesting idea.

To play devil's advocate: to me, "logging out" and "exiting" are not the same
thing. Particularly, the first is just a change of state--I'm still in your
app, but now I'm no longer signed in. On the other hand, "exiting" is more
like a motion; I expect to actually leave your app and not just be logged out.
In UI terms, I see "exit" as a synonym of "quit".

Now, perhaps this makes sense for your app. However, if it makes sense to
interact with it without being logged in, I think that is the wrong
terminology. So I would definitely _not_ use it for something like HN because
browsing stories works regardless of whether I'm logged in or not.

I'm sure you thought about this far more when you were making your decision,
so this is just my impression. You can always try to test the alternative
empirically once you have a bunch of active users :).

~~~
srik
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree one would indeed expect to not be signed out
by chosing exit. We happen to use google auth and are in this uncommon
situation where the sign out action, actually signs the user out of their
google account, which so far has annoyed every sigle one of our testers.

We are looking into a few other alternatives including the most obvious where
we convey that they are indeed leaving the app but in the next screen let the
user know that their google account is still signed in and provide an option
if they still want to sign out. Thankfully we have quite a while to launch, so
I have time to run a couple other iterations and pick the one which seems most
clear.

------
trentmb
I use my Login to Log In.

~~~
srik
I want you to know Im exercising so much restraint to hold back my reddit
impulse to quip,"Yo Dawg". Its amazing how easily we have come to change
behavior, attitudes and expectations from other members as we move from one
online place to another.

------
lbolla
The most annoying thing to me is seeing that popularity is mislead for
authority or correctness. Why would the options chosen by the majority of
people be the most correct one? Pitfalls of democracy...

~~~
pygy_
It's not democracy, it's just how non-formal language evolves.

People agree on the meaning of symbols/conventions, and then dictionaries draw
targets around the arrows.

~~~
lbolla
I agree in principle, but where do schools fit in your picture? Schools should
teach you the meaning of things and then, only if the available meanings don't
fit your reality, then people should recur to "agreement". I like to think
that Shakespeare (or Dante, in my language) words weight more than FB posts to
define the meaning of things ;-)

~~~
pygy_
It all depends for whom... Schools are inherently conservative, and slow down
the evolution, as did the paper medium for written communications (and iPhone
auto-correct).

But now, forget Facebook, think SMS and IM. In 50 years, everyone under 75
will be familiar with its vocabulary, and will have used more for personal
communication than the "correct" language. I predict that, school be damned,
it will replace the current spelling in everyday life for most people.

Note that I love beautiful language and its historical roots. At the gut
level, I find it painful to watch it being torn down. But I'm too young to be
a curmudgeon...

~~~
lbolla
I agree with your prediction, but it scares me that a medium that should make
communications easier will actually put more barriers between ages.

I already do not understand SMS spelling: in 50 years, probably a 30 years old
person will not understand things written by a 15 years old person.

Conservatism in schools has the advantage that we can still read Shakespeare
(or Dante) without translation. Languages that change too quickly defy their
own purpose (i.e. being a common ground for people to communicate).

~~~
pygy_
I wholeheartedly agree.

Conservatism isn't inherently bad, and innovation for its own sake is idiotic.

Note that, for Shakespeare at least, even though one can still understand the
main meaning of the text, a lot of puns and cultural references are lost to
the modern reader (lest he's a specialized literature scholar)...

------
NaturalDoc
I don't recall ever hearing a viewer / user complain about what the developer
called the thing. I also don't remember ever reading a blog where a start-up
founder obsessed over it, although I'm sure there's been one or two that we
never heard of.

Therefore, I simply don't think about it and typically just use "login". It's
recognizable, it simple, and users know what to do with it. Everything else is
simply keeping you away from the more important parts of your project. Just
one man's opinion.

------
snorkel
Just survey the top sites on the web and use whatever terminology they use. It
may not be grammatically correct but their users understand what it means.

~~~
tb303
Also not a good approach. Many of the "top sites" on the web are not such
because they follow best practices at all, they are top sites because of their
content. The stakes are a lot higher for us here in startupland. Clear
language and predictable affordances make %s of difference in conversion.

------
antninja
They forgot connect / disconnect which is easier to translate than anything
with 'log' or even 'sign'.

~~~
i_cannot_hack
That is only a good choice if you are actually connecting to something. In
most websites you are connected to the same server no matter what you do, and
all the login does is to give you special permissions.

------
tocomment
I always write "login/on" to be cheeky :-)

------
alpine
When coding, I also have to stop and think about:

\- website vs web site \- setup vs set up

That is just two examples that come to mind in as many seconds.

------
nwmcsween
Don't use any, there is no such action as a {log,sign}{in,off,on} what there
is is a session between the client and server so call it what it is a session.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
I could also further argue that there is no session, there is only a HTTP
cookie representing state. And then argue that there are no cookies, just a
piece of data sent by a website and stored by the browser, and so on..

The point is that the actions do not cease to exist simply because they are
abstractions over a lower level of operation. Users don't need to know what
sessions are and it detracts from the user experience, so its not a good idea
to expose them to the details of that level of abstraction.

~~~
nwmcsween
I don't believe a user is by default ignorant and I don't treat them as such
it also doesn't detract from user experience as now we have
session/{create,new,destroy] instead of what this very question presents.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
I see no reason to assume that a user understands what HTTP sessions are on a
site where the userbase is non-technical like gmail or Facebook or the vast
majority of sites online. Mentioning sessions to them will detract from their
experience. Furthermore, I don't think a technical user would be offended by
use of a non technical term like login/signin if there's no need for a
technical one.

Finally, I don't see any clear distinction between session/create and
session/new. I'm confused about which one corresponds to creating an account
vs logging in. I'd say confusing terminology like that is far worse for user
experience than any of the log/sign options.

