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I work for a TV/Telco company and I'm looking at if its a good idea to open up some of the 'My Account' management section of our site to users who are only partially logged in. In a very similar way to what Amazon does today. Despite not being logged in I can still access my account page and access certain non-sensitive journeys.

On our site today if we don't know who you are or if you're browsing anonymously on our site you get a very generic version of our homepage. If you login then we personalise the content and offers shown based on your account. - If you then re-visit the page within 30 days we'll continue to offer a personalised experience (though not as exact or personal as if you we're logged in) via a cookie we drop on your machine.

We do this on our homepage and help pages to drive content and personalised experience to our users. Its been successful for us to-date and our users like the personal experience.

Now I'd like to extend this functionality to 'some' account pages on our site.

This would mean you can visit your account page, be partially logged in, and we could still offer you a limited experience.

Should account pages only ever appear once logged in?

Is their value in still surfacing some of these related pages and journeys (minus sensitive information of course).

My hypothesis is by showing more journeys outside of a login you'll show more users more of what they can do and get a higher journey completion rate.

Would love to hear other people's views or insight in this.

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  • Why do you want non-logged in users to have access to My Account features of all things? I know apps like HBOGO allow a non-logged in user to browse the catalogue without an account-- but that is the actual site content. It seems you are already doing something similar by caching their personalized recommendations. That makes sense to me. What specifically are you trying to highlight within your My Account feature set that you think will appeal to users and improve account creation conversions?
    – mtv.vac
    Oct 11, 2016 at 16:15
  • Depends if you have or plan to show any sensitive information on that page (like PII or PFI)
    – Igorek
    Oct 12, 2016 at 5:10
  • The Hypothesis is that by allowing users to 'view' the page and journeys you can access they will be more likely to sign in and complete the journey. Also to your comment we wouldn't be showing any sensitive information to a partially logged in user. They would have to login to see billing info etc.
    – TFEB
    Oct 17, 2016 at 10:56
  • For me it's a NO. You should consider different users on same computer (a family, or a couple) .. why show account info if not logged ?
    – roetnig
    Apr 10, 2017 at 6:49
  • Thanks for the comments guys. But to confirm our product only allows one account per household so that wouldn't really be an issue for us. To confirm though we will absolutely not be showing any sensitive information to a user who is not fully logged in. Also again to reiterate the hypothesis is that by showing a landing page (minus sensitive info) you show users more of the journeys they can complete here. Rather than a login screen that doesn't do a great job of telling users why they should login and what they can do when logged in.
    – TFEB
    Apr 11, 2017 at 12:21

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This is something user research will help you answer. Conduct user interviews, study their daily tasks overall goals. This will help you understand what you really ought to be doing to help them achieve those goals.

The notion of being partially logged in not common, so it's best you do sufficient research and some initial prototype testing to see if this is something that can really work.

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  • That's our plan. Show this to users in the lab and also run an A/B test to validate the hypothesis. :)
    – TFEB
    Oct 17, 2016 at 10:57
  • or not validate as the case may be...
    – TFEB
    Oct 17, 2016 at 10:58

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