User login experience for web app

Question

I have designed what I believe to be the simplest possible user experience for a website. There are only 4 buttons in total on the whole page and the look is very clean.

But there is nowhere to put the logout button. The way I have it setup, if you try to do an action that requires login a modal will pop-up for you to login/signup. Once that's done the modal disappears and the action executes.

I don't see a good place to put a logout button and I really don't want to mess the UI by placing menus / etc. I am considering two options:

1) Make the browser lose the session when the window / tab is closed. This has the disadvantage of requiring users to login the next time they open the app. I am not sure I am willing to accept such experience as it may discourage them from performing authenticated actions (which I want them to perform).

2) Leave the users logged in forever, with no way to log out other than clearing cookies.

Would you consider 2) an acceptable experience? It is not really a confidential app or anything.

Answer 1

First of all, you haven't provided much information about your web app - what is the purpose of it, what kind of users will be using it, etc. If you give that information maybe our community can give a neat ways of loging out your users. Otherwise my answer is:

I think that you should definitely add a logout button. Imagine if that my brother wants a separate account. How would we log out and switch accounts if you don't have logout button? Your interface would be partially unusable just because of that.

Anyways, you can put the logout button but make it less visible to the interface, so it doesn't visually interfere with your primary content - the 4 buttons. You can do it by making the logout link/button 50% transparent.

The logout button should be located at at the top right corner of the interface, in order to be consistent with other interfaces.

Answer 2

It would be a really poor UX decision to use any app that kept me logged in forever with no way of logging off. In fact I wouldn't use the app simply because of this choice.

You may say that it isn't confidential, but that isn't your decision as what is confidential to one person isn't confidential to another.

Option 1 isn't a great idea either, but if I were forced to choose between the two, I would opt for 1.

However, I don't necessarily accept the argument that there is no space to allow a way of logging out. It doesn't have to be a logout button per se, but there should be some way of getting to the logout action. There are many ways of handling this, but you've effectively discarded them as options without first trying to deal with your design.

Alternatively (assuming there REALLY is no way of having a visual way to log out), you could use a simple URL to log a user out (such as myapp.com/logout) and make this clear when the user signs in.