Users are increasingly more comfortable with using their email address as a credential. In fact, web citizens who prefer anonymity would rather offer their email than their legal name. An email also is unique, a huge advantage over using legal names on forms. I would suggest that users in general prefer to offer "nicknames" rather than their legal name when the identifier will be used on something like comment threads for controversial news stories.
Think of a user's online connections as very wobbly looking wheel.. When making connections, users are extending an endless amount of interactive spokes with their email being the hub. Without that connection to the hub, users can't expect important status updates, reply notifications etc. The value of a product/service which only leaves disconnected artifacts "somewhere out there" is questionable. Even with the robust spam filtering most of us now enjoy, user data etiquette is critical. Jared mentioned "promises" and assistant text. I wonder if we as a community could agree on standard ways to address this consistently across all the products we design. For example, we could agree to always pair sensitive data entry fields with "How will this be used?"(As a public identifier, account credential, etc) controls. I see this being done sporadically, and we could all benefit from respecting common standards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46826 ________________________________________________________________ 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
