SIGN UP IN A MOBILE CONTEXT – PART III

Missed the first part? Read it here. What about the second part? Read it here.

Current Real-World Practices Study

 In 2016, we were at the edge of a new Information Age where mobile seems to be king, user information weights its weight in gold and a great number of mobile applications are published and developed every day. Each of these apps has their way of dealing with its own signup processes. So, how do they balance fast access with the account creation requirements for their systems? Generally, we can distinguish three techniques:

• Unique Account

Creating a unique account is the traditional approach to any signup process. The system demands the creation of a unique username (or an email address) and a corresponding password for an account to be registered. Additional information is typically requested to complete the user’s data. Depending on the amount of data the system requires at this stage, the common form issues we identified earlier have a high probability of occurring.

• Social Login

The advent of Social Networks allowed for the creation of a very interesting alternative to the unique account standard, by taking advantage of practically every user being the owner of a social platform account (and therefore, identity). Social login translates into permission-based access to a user’s first-party identity data, making it possible to ease the identity creation (eliminating repetition and reusing the established identity) for the application’s system.

• Hybrid Approach

Translates into the possibility to offer both previous techniques. It essentially means users are given the freedom to signup however they want.

Social Login is quickly overthrowing Unique Account as the norm regarding registration flows. In theory, it is fairly easy to understand why Social Login is so appreciated: it usually requires a single step, typically one tap on an action button. Also, this technique has proven to have increased registration rates and contribute to minimizing the signup barrier (by removing the need for usernames and passwords).

 The Hybrid Approach is also becoming a popular choice for app developers, designers, and product owners, mainly because it offers the most flexibility. However, it also adds the extra load in complexity and effort to support a choice (a multiple signup feature) that is probably not used by many users.

 To verify these conjectures, we made a small research exercise by taking 2016’s top applications and test their signup processes in terms of user input type and effort, including the available techniques. In order to achieve this, we queried for some of the top apps within the Apple iTunes and Google Play Stores and selected the non-game apps for this study (games are a unique type of application, with its own set of guidelines which is out of the scope of this article). The following list identifies our objects of study: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Skype, Spotify, Pinterest, Uber, and Amazon Store.

Table 1 gives us a pretty interesting outline of how the signup techniques were being employed by top applications, in 2016. Firstly, all the applications provide a Unique Account creation scheme (which makes sense as it is the traditional approach taken by many software pieces). Secondly, we can confirm that Facebook is the top choice when Social Login is available, followed by Google+ (which is already dead nowadays). Finally, we can also perceive that the Hybrid Approach is employed in almost half of these apps and two of them even go as far as offering the possibility to either create a unique account or register through Facebook or register through Google+ (a multiple signup feature). Next, let’s take a look at the necessary user input types and effort for each of these applications:

Figure 1 illustrates the minimum amount of effort needed to signup on the studied applications, for each of the available techniques. To quantify this effort metric we considered the minimum amount of interactions needed to create an account. Each interaction can be one of the following user actions: a tap on the screen to select an option, an input field where the user is asked to type his / her data, and a swipe movement when the user is asked to scroll through a list. The results couldn’t be more overwhelmingly clear. Social Login is the fastest way to register a user account on these apps. Only WhatsApp comes close with its Unique Account technique (which is, in fact, different from most apps).

You can read the next and final part here.