This article was written by **Logto* Team - An open-source solution helps you build the sign-in, auth, and user identity within minutes. Check out our GitHub ! (4.8k stars)*
We are thrilled to announce the release of the newest version of the Sign-in Experience, which includes more ways to sign-in and sign-up, as well as a framework that is easier to understand and more flexible to configure in the Admin Console. When compared to Sign-in Experience V1, this version's capability was expanded so that it could support a greater variety of flexible use cases. We hope that this will be able to assist developers in delivering a successful sign-in flow, which will also be appreciated by the end users.
In this article, we'll go over the history of Sign-in Experience, including its conception, design decisions, and product tradeoffs. You will also gain a better grasp of how to construct a successful and frictionless sign-in or sign-up experience.
If you're unfamiliar with Logto, let me back up a bit and define it, as well as the connection between Logto and the Sign-in Experience.
As an OIDC-based identity service, Logto is available as open source software allowing professionals, groups, and companies to set up the necessary sign-in and identity infrastructure in a matter of minutes.
Our portfolio and key components of Logto
Providing a straightforward sign-up process forms one of our top priorities. The sign-in process can be quickly customized by developers using the Admin Console without the need for any custom coding.
We saw a lot of challenges and problems in the market before we started Logto, and that's why we spent tonnes of time researching and talking to customers, developers, and businesses that were having trouble with their sign-up processes.
| Roles | Pain Points |
|---|---|
| Developer, Team (Builders) | Creating a smooth sign-up process is a mundane but intricate endeavor. Tasks like composing 0-1 front-end code and ensuring platform consistency. Unfortunately, this problem is exacerbated for the early-stage startup or for individual developers because there is no professional design or product team to help them. |
| If developers didn't have to deal with and manage the chore, they could put more effort into the main product and other impactful priorities. | |
| Business stakeholders | Sign-up forms that users can fill out on their own are an ideal way for user acquisition. It takes into account the requirements of multiple disciplines and data growth. Building a Sign-in and sign-up process that has everyone happy requires a lot of back-and-forth because of all the decisions that need to be made. |
| End customers | Quick and smooth is the key and a single blocker can ruin the whole game. For example, multiple unnecessary accounts, blocked by terribly designed flow are definitely huge concerns for the end users. |
| Security and privacy are seriously taken care of too. An untrusted flow or sign-in UI can prevent users from moving forwards and end up dropping off the product. | |
| Similar solutions in the market | We're not naive; we know there are other open-source sign-in flow solutions out there. However, |
| few authentication and identification options are supported. |
Furthermore, the final user experience between consumer-facing apps and B2B SaaS products is very different. Focusing on customer identity first and being business and industry-agnostic — taking on the Sign-in Experience happening in our daily lives, such as e-commerce, food delivery, and entertainment — is important to us because it will allow us to make an accessible product and build the strong foundation step by step. In the meantime, think ahead and keep exploring extensive user cases of sign-in for different verticals that can be simply applied to many types of businesses in the near future.
With that in mind, we aim to make this step so easy that even those with no prior experience with programming may set up a self-serve sign-up process. Logto V1 was released in July 2022 and has since had a lot of positive feedback from users all across the world, helping us reach 4.4k stars in just two months with limited promotional resources. This motivates us to keep going! It was important to us to make sure that our global audience could use our service, therefore we added support for additional sign-in methods in version 2. Compare Version 1 to Version 2 and see what we backed first.
Logto Sign-in Experience v2 Preview
| V1 | V2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Create account | It was defined by the primary method of your sign-in methods | Our users have a lot of leeway in creating a workable combination because we've separated the approaches by identifiers and authentication factors. |
Identifier: Username, Email, Phone number, Email or Phone number
Authentication: Password, Verification code
Then you will have the following workable sign-up combination:
Limited 3 combinations | Then you will have the following workable sign-in combination:
| | Branding | Color, Logo, Headline | Our branding structure and responsive design for a wider range of screen sizes have been enhanced from V1. | | Dark mode | Auto-generated dark mode color based on branding color | We have refined the mapping of tokens and algorithms in the dark mode. | | Languages | 2 languages | 7 standard language options with full localization flexibility, and customized language addition is all open to the community | | Forget password | N/A | Right now, full end-to-end support is available | | Security improvement | N/A | Verify first in case of hacker hack around for Personal Identifiable Information |
Now that you know what we brought to the table in V2, let's examine the road we took to get there and the backstory that led us here.