- Create an account with an email and password
- Thank you message: “Please confirm your account”
- Go to your inbox, click the “Confirm your email”
- Thank you message: “Please sign in”
- You still there? Now you can actually start using the app…
It might sound familiar to you. It is how many applications work today.
There is a much better way!
Do we need email confirmation?
I have yet to find anyone telling me they like to receive email confirmations. They are needed to verify a user is the legitimate owner of the email they used to sign up.
To make sure the user is the rightful receiver of the data and that they are not impersonating someone else. Accounting for these uses cases we set out to reduce friction in our sign up flow without sacrificing privacy or security.
What does signing up look like without email confirmation?
- Create an account with an email and password
- That’s it… you’re in!
We reduced a 4 step process to 1. Previously, the user would have to go to their inbox and often the confirmation email can take time to arrive or even end up in spam causing them to hang around looking at their inbox pressing refresh frantically, or worse – get distracted by more pressing matters waiting in their inbox and not return to the app. Now you can experience our product right away.
- How do you access the limited features then?
- How do you access the limited features then?
As soon as the user wants to take one of the limited actions mentioned above, prompt them with a message explaining “For your security, because we really care for security, this feature is only available once you confirm your email.”
- Email confirmation is still painful at this point, but the user understands why we need it. It is not an arbitrary requirement that you need to go through first hand.
- Automatically log him out after 48 hours and send him another email to let him know. This gives an extra incentive to confirm his account in a timely fashion.
- We went from a 4 step process to 1 and we made the application resilient to email deliverability issues.
We moved the pain closer to the actual benefit. And we let the user test our application with no strings attached. It definitely was some extra work but as the data suggests, it was well worth the effort!
source visible.vc/engineering/signup-flow-without-email-confirmation/