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Login with email vs. username

Posted: March 7th, 2009 | Author: Adrian | Filed under: Good practices | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments »

Today we’ll discuss why is much better to ask the user to login with email/password instead of username/password. I’ll be short and punctual, i don’t like long blabbing articles the essence of which can be written in a line, so:

  1. The email address can’t be already registered (obviously), and if it is, you registered it and you can request a new password
  2. As a consequence of the above, the user can’t forget his email. You may be having what, 2-3 email addresses? You can’t forget them
  3. One less field on the register form. Everybody hates long forms
  4. You make the users use a real name, instead of s_87757 or pinkygirl1995 or other crap like that

If you think of something else, drop a line and i’ll add reasons.

7 Comments on “Login with email vs. username”

  1. 1 Dan Burzo said at 6:14 pm on March 9th, 2009:

    Hello,

    I think the best solution depends on the context. Email is superior to username for single-user-based applications (couldn’t find a better term), where there’s no need to publicly identify the user in a social context.

    For the many social applications online, it might not be appropriate to identify the user by their email address (for privacy concerns), so you still need some kind of “screen name”.

  2. 2 admin said at 10:16 pm on March 11th, 2009:

    Yeah, i’m thinking what a mess would be if Myspace would use full name of users… Social networks is a science of it’s own.

  3. 3 Terry Kavanaugh said at 5:22 pm on March 18th, 2009:

    I agree with Dan. I would also say that while you or I may not like “pinkygirl1995″, there may be someone (or a group of people) who do like the name.

    Maybe there is a Susan Smith, who graduated from school in 1995 and who goes by the nickname “pinkygirl” with her friends? If so, she may really, really, really like the name and for stickiness reasons (for fun and to keep Susan coming back), maybe the application should display it in some way.

    But I also agree, it is kind of silly. But silly isn’t always a “bad” thing….

  4. 4 admin said at 5:24 pm on March 18th, 2009:

    it basically depends of the application and it’s purpose

  5. 5 Overview on login forms | Usability Thoughts said at 12:48 pm on March 24th, 2009:

    [...] discussed the other day about the login with email vs. username and I came to the conclusion that it depends on the type of the application, if it’s social, [...]

  6. 6 Razvan said at 1:30 pm on March 31st, 2009:

    I like the idea of using emails as login keys because, with the user’s consent, you can tap into a public API from servives like Google or Yahoo and pick-up extra information that the user might need to fill in his profile page or that can help make your product more useful to him.

  7. 7 Virusescu said at 1:03 pm on April 18th, 2009:

    You’re right admin.
    Maybe I’ll just state the obvious, but registering and logging-in doesn’t have anything to do with data displayed on site.
    If you deal with a big “social network” you can simply let the user choose his Display Name.

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