Universal Login
Platforms
Online, iOS, Android, Mac, Windows
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Timeframe
Fall 2021—Fall 2022
My Role
Journey mapping, UX Design, Prototyping, Interaction Design, UI Design & Illustrations
Worked with one other UX designer
THE CHALLENGE
VitalSource has a wide range of student & learner-facing products, all of which require the same account information to login. The login and create account experiences were drastically different across products, creating a confusing user experience.
Our primary goal was to create one consistent experience that would cover all requirements across our different products. The secondary goal was to create an experience that would eventually support third party social login capability.
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
First, we had to understand the range of current different login and create account experiences across our products. We started by mapping out the full user journeys of the login, create account & reset password experiences for each product, in addition to a multitude of edge cases during the login experience. We wanted to ensure that we fully understood the end to end UX flows, and where there were areas of overlap and areas of inconsistencies.
NAILING DOWN THE UX
Once we had the user journeys mapped out, we went back through each flow and pulled all of the current screens in each flow, in order to determine where the UX & UI inconsistencies were. What parts of the flow were drastically different across our products? How could we simplify these to create one experience that meets all requirements? And even within individual products, where are the areas of bloat or complexity that we can simplify to create a more streamlined user experience?
A good example that exhibited many of these inconsistencies and complexities was our reset password flow across two of our products: across the error messaging, email communication, required fields, UI, and more. The emails that were triggered throughout each flow were also significantly different in language and UI, creating a very confusing experience.
CLEANING IT UP
We determined what elements of these flows we needed to keep for product requirements, and which items we could remove or simplify in order to streamline the flow. At this point, we designed a simplified UI that utilized as much as we could from our existing design system, stewie.
It was easy to see an immediate difference when we mapped out the new reset password flow using the updated UI.
FINALIZING THE UI
We applied the updated UI and flow across our different products, accomplishing our goal of creating a consistent & elegant login experience, regardless of where the user is initiating login from, and whether authentication happens in a full screen experience versus an overlaid modal.
I finalized the UI by creating a fun illustration for the products that have a full-screen login experience, and created rules around branding for our white label clients who need a more customized experience.
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In addition, we also ensured that this entire experience responded down to mobile & tablet screens, and added splash screen UI to welcome a user into the mobile app experience.
