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This is something I have been struggling with and overthinking.

SCENARIO

I have a website where customers create accounts, log-in and work in a dashboard to create and post items.The homepage simple serves to tell the public about my site, advertise my services and have a button to login or signup. There isn't really any useful content to show on the front page apart from this.

QUESTION

If the customer visits the homepage of my site, and they are already logged in, which of the following should they see:

  1. The homepage the same as a regular customer with a link to see their dashboard instead of the login button (As per mailchimp)
  2. The dashboard directly (As per gmail, hotmail etc)

Option 1 seems much more conventional approach. However, my thinking is, if I know the user is a customer already, then why waste time showing them the features of the site, just get them straight in their dashboard.

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  • How do you plan to make existing registered users aware of new features, or announcements, or changes to existing functionality? – CJF Mar 23 '14 at 17:29
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Let's call the site section before users login the marketing site and the section they see once logged-in the app.

If the marketing site and the app functionality overlap (like in the case of Amazon) you should pick 1 - you see the same site but you may be a guest or a logged-in user.

If the marketing site and the app have no common functionality, then pick 2 - logged in users will login in order to reach the app functionality.

Note that it is extremely common to provide a different URL to the marketing and app sites, so marketing will be www.example.com, while the app maight be www.example.com/app. This allows users to easily reach the marketing site by editing the URL.

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If possible may be you can create a mix of home page and dashboard, I mean display some features of home page to already logged in users along with dashboard features. When user logs out the logged in user specifc features will be not shown. If its not possible then may be you can go with option 1 with a prominently displayed link to go to user dashboard. In addition you can also provide a feature for logged in users like radio button which askes users on first login that they want to see home page or dashboard in their future visits.

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I think you should take them directly to their dashboard, but possibly an option to go back to the homepage. Maybe have a subdomain such as dash.domain.com that serves as the dashboard, and then a small icon on a navigation bar or something.

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  • Can you elaborate on why? – Charles Wesley Mar 23 '14 at 16:16
  • If the homepage is just useless information once you have signed up then there's no need to display it, however it's always handy to give them the option to see it if they wish. – BrandonFlude Mar 23 '14 at 16:17

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