Tuesday, December 7, 2010

3 reasons why I don't key off of email anymore.

For some of my clients, I built their stuff such that a user only needed an email and a password. Registration was easy and it was awesome. Now, I have introduced a login name back in. Here is why.

Emails Change

I had clients that lost jobs and they needed to change their email; well, that required writing a change email function. That's not pleasant because emails may already exist due to a prior sign up or a different use case.

People get fired, two employees at a company. One used their personal to sign up to product where as the other used their business. The one who used their personal got fired and the needs to transfer access to the other employee, but its already taken. So, either I have account merger or they manage multiple credentials. Never the less, they have to call in for support if we present an obstacle. Additionally, companies get bought and emails change.

By adding the level of indirection, I'm enabling them to handle these issues themselves rather than supporting it on our end.

Multiple Accounts per Email

If you enable a single email to manage multiple accounts, then you help them out companies that have different billable uses of your product. Otherwise, you require them to be able to setup multiple emails which just sucks.

Multiple Managers/Owners

If you focus on providing a single account, then you can enable your product to be managed by multiple people (or enable collaborative features). It is easy to key off of the account's login name to enable multiple users to access the account.

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