Managing your customers user accounts

Allowing your customers a frustration free account creation experience is the best thing you can ever do to give them a good first impression.

Remember, they have decided they need to have a deeper interaction with you, they want more of your services and or products, they have gone the extra mile and you've slapped them in the face and made them feel rejected or dejected if for some reason, they cannot sign up for an account on your digital platform.

Case One: No money from me

I received a bill from my water supplier company. It wasn't the first bill I had from them, and I went to log into my account on their website, but found my login credentials were not recognised. Undaunted, I proceeded to sign up for an account, prompted even more so because they were promoting their new account service via the bill with the tag line 'you asked and we listened'

I entered the url of the page, and was presented with a simple form that asked for three things

• My Account number
• My postcode
• My email address

Nice, I entered the details and pressed the 'Register' button. The system told me my email address was already in use. Hmmm, ok so my next course of action was to go to the forgotten password link. I entered my email address and was told an email was winging it's way to my inbox with instructions of how to reset my password.

Success! or so I thought.

The next 15 minutes was spent in a frustrating cycle of password resets, lockouts, entering verification codes and bollocks!

In the end, I gave up. I also didn't pay my bill. Whilst I will pay it using some other means, because I have to, the company has failed to secure renumeration from a customer who was willing to give it to them, due to a failure in their account creation/login system.

Imagine if I didn't have to use this company at all, they would have lost my money forever.

Case Two: What the hell?

This second case is equally as annoying as the first. Whilst I have an account with this second company, again a utility company, they have some strange phenomena that only logs my account in if I use a link that was previously sent in an earlier email. If I hit the login link from their website it doesn't recognise my credentials.

This has happened on numerous occasions and frankly I've had enough and will be switching from them very shortly.

Prevention is better than a cure

Without a through Quality Assurance (QA) process, you cannot be sure that your account creation/login system works for the customer 100% of the time, or at least ir 99.9993% of the time.

An account management system must have the following processes

• Sign up (new account creation)
• Verification
• Login
• Forgotten/Reset password
• Forgotten username
• Logout

Each of these processes should be thoroughly tested to ensure the user journey can be completed with minimal fuss and disruption.

We would suggest the following test scenarios in each journey

Sign up

• Can the user access the sign up page easily from any page on your site
• Can the account be created with minimal information
• Does your sign up verify the user's email or phone
• Can the user create their own username
• Does the verfication process work effortlessly
• Do you show validation messages for fields that required strict formats or criteria (e.g. correct email formatting or password length/composition)

Verification

• Does verification via phone (usually sms) work
• Does veritication via email work
• Is verification form accessible via a link from your website
• Once verification complete is the user automatically logged in or is user re-directed to the login page

Login

• Can the user access the login page easily from any page on your site
• Does the system allow passwords to be copied and pasted into the password field (primary importance for users that use password generator systems)
• Does the user receive clear messages and instructions if login has failed
• If the account is not found, is the user directed to create an account

There are other checks that you can do but you should have the bare bones above to help you design a system that works for you and for your customers.