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I'm building a new web app that requires email verification. I'm looking to all you UX experts (I'm more of a back end developer) to guide me.
So, the user has just signed up. I'm taking them now to a page that basically says "please go check your email".
I think this is just a bit shitty. I'm toying with the idea of letting them use the app and giving them like 24 hours to confirm their email. What do you all think?
me,
The scenario you have described does not have a fixed solution. It depends on what kind of application you are developing. But allowing users to login/ signin with their social accounts is the best-suited option in any case as it saves users efforts and makes the application more user-friendly. We can further classify the solution in following ways.
Scenario 1: Here you will make users mandatory to go to their email to verify their account. Here you can show a screen thanking the user for subscribing and telling him to check his email. This solution is best suited for business applications. Here you can keep an expiry time for the link
Scenario 2: Here you will ask the user to check email to verify the account. But still, you will allow the user to navigate in your app. Here you can just show a pop up telling that a link has been mailed to them for account verification. This is best suited for shopping carts and business apps where you want the user to understand your app. Here you can keep an expiry time for the link.
Scenario 3: Here you will mail the link to the user and give a small popup notifying them of the link that is emailed to them. The user is free to navigate and do any thing in app, just before doing any purchase (for shopping carts like apps) or creating lists or databases or something that needs data to be stored (for business like applications) you should remind user for verifying the account from the link. This is mostly for apps which will collect data and do nothing else.
So check your scenario and do accordingly. still using Social signin is most appropriate way.
There could be multiple solutions to your problem:
Unfortunately this is not a solvable problem. The only way for it to work is to not require email validation, or for them to eventually follow the link that was emailed.
As far as what to do in the meantime, the best rule is to allow them to do and see anything that doesn't strictly require email verification -- e.g., view community content, make and edit a profile, etc. that way they feel like they're getting somewhere, even if full privileges are pending. This also gives them a better way of resenting validation if they don't get the original email.
The only free way around this is social login, if you want to eliminate the validation step entirely. If you force users to signup using their Facebook, Google or Twitter accounts then you do not need to validate the email address.
If you don't mind spending money, then you should consider something like text message/phone call verification (Google does this when you signup for a Google account). But this could get expensive for every signup you get, a service like Twilio will allow you to implement such functionality at a cost.
I have seen sites that allow you to use the site and display a constant notification bar along the top telling you to confirm your email address to fully unlock access to the site (like you suggested). I think this could be an acceptable solution, it's a tricky problem with no clever workaround.
I feel having only social login will not serve the purpose. There is a chance that user step out of the application when they see sign up using "Gmail, Facebook or linked in". Reson may be it ask access to contacts, read, etc, when you signup with social..
Better to have both the option wherein when user tries to register with email id or phone number, use OTP to continue the registration process.
