It may be around 50/50 between user ID and email today, but email is becoming a lot more common. I strongly advocate for email because people have enough things to remember, and each site out in the wild loves to impose its own arbitrary requirements for user IDs (at least x characters, at least one number, at least one capital letter, etc.). This lack of standardization in user IDs effectively prevents users from using the same user ID for all sites, which means the user has more to memorize. This produces great distaste for the site and will likely result in more clicks of the "Forgot User ID" link.
Email addresses, on the other hand, are well defined ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4.1), so validation is straightforward and users can use the same email address for all sites that accept email addresses. What's more, email addresses are likely more easily remembered than user IDs because of how often they are used. One con to email addresses that comes to mind is that they are longer to type. However, this objection is easily overcome by their ease of recall, by Remember me checkboxes, and by browsers' save password functionality. One pro to user IDs is that users can always click Forgot user ID and have it sent to their email addresses. If a user forgets his/her email address, what do you do then? A great model to follow is that of Facebook.com, which allows a user to sign in with any of the email addresses that the site has on file for a user. Facebook recognizes that people sometimes change email addresses and there's no need to punish someone for doing that. On Jan 29, 2009 4:00 AM, "Mark Johnston" <[email protected]> wrote: Would love to hear peoples thoughts on the whole ID vs Email address for registration or signing into a website. We have been debating and discussing things for a good while at work to come up with the most accepted/usable low barrier to entry system that we can conceive for our customers to interact with us. Unfortunately when looking around it is pretty much a 50/50 with what the rest of the web are doing. Has anybody done any research or have opinions for the pros and cons for each device? It really is a sticking point for a lot of people in the business right now with everybody having their preferred method. Mark Johnston ======================================================== This Message has been scanned for Viruses by AUSTAR Communications Antivirus and content checking applications. AUSTAR Communications ======================================================== ________________________________________________________________ Reply to this thread at ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37879 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
