Your on-boarding process is very critical to the success of your business. It’s your user’s first point of contact with your business. It is therefore important to pay attention to the experience being delivered to the users. Here are some of the best practices to put in place:

Social Login/Sign-up: Today’s internet users are impatient and would have little or no time to spare. It could be a daunting process to keep track of several account logins for them. This is why social login matters. It is important to make this part of the features incorporated into your application. This will enable users Sign-up or login into your application with their account details from already existing applications. Almost everyone has a Google account these days, this should be your top choice integration. Others include Facebook, Twitter etc. It all really depends on your industry. If you are building more of a fun app or maybe an app for socializing, Instagram could be an option for you. If you are building an app for designers, Dribbble or Behance could be an option, if you are building something for developers, Github should be your go-to-option.

Terms of Service: Terms of service and privacy policies are being taken seriously across the internet. It is important to ensure you make users indicate their interest in agreeing to your terms of services while signing up. This an be implemented by having them tick a box right before the sign up button. You can make the sign up button ‘inactive’ till they have ticked the box. At your back-end also, do make sure these are recorded. This is particularly important if your product is around Fintech as most country’s financial regulatory bodies are known to carry out random audits which can make or mar your company

Two Factor Authentication: This is commonly referred to as 2FA. This is an extra layer of security added beyond securing user accounts with just passwords and usernames. This requires them to enter a ‘One Time Passcode’ before being allowed to login into an application. It is often done in such a way that communication is done completely off the platform. The OTP is usually sent to customer’s phone numbers as text message or via an Authenticator app installed on their phone. Users can download apps such as Google Authenticator or Authy to secure their account. I’d highly recommend the Authy app however as it fosters easy migration by users to another device.

Captcha: According to Captcha.net, “The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.” In simple terms, this helps prevent your signup/login forms against bots. Websites without captchas are usually prone to spammers ready to flood your email boxes with service offerings you are possibly uninterested in. This does not only prevent spam but also prevents unauthorized access to your user’s accounts by bots and hackers. If there’s no captcha installed on your platform, you are likely to get your mail box flooded in little or no time.

Password Strength Meters and Password Requirements: Password strength meters are used to indicate how secure a password chosen by a user is. As users are entering passwords, it gets to update to indicate how secure it is, it is usually indicated by weak, strong, very strong which can also be supported by accent colors to make them easily noticeable. Password Requirements are however different as they display several criteria passwords set by users must meet such as at-least one uppercase, one lowercase, one symbol etc.

Error Messages: During the process of achieving a task, it is important to let users know where they might have made errors and steps to take to correct them, it a username is take, they should get a message that says ‘username is taken, try another’ not just a message that says ‘error’. If a password is too weak, it is important to display criteria the password has not met.

Do you have any other tips? Feel free to share with us in the comment box below.