Single Sign-on method is being used more and more in different websites to grant access by using an existing social network account and avoid users to be registered again into the new platform.

However, as a user I struggle a lot to decide when I’m asked to ‘Log in’ or ‘Register’ into the website, since I only see buttons which looks the same and I cannot remember whether I was already registered or not.

The only difference relies on the own platform registering system and the labels used for getting access with my social network account.

The possitive outcome of this “confusion” is that we can start making the authenticated access more natural to users avoiding any reference to this two actions: register and login.

I know, there’s a difference from the system perspective since the first-time access users are asked for permission. But, is that really something that the user need to know?

Wouldn’t be just easier to provide one single option and eventually explain the user that is about to login for first time?

If we do so, users will need to click only once most of the times, they’ll be encouraged to use a SSO method, instead of re-creating an account.

That would be a real Single Sign-on, and this is how I think it should look-like:

Other label options could be: Access, Enter, You, Login or Who the hell are you? – that depends on your service tone of voice.

After clicking on the prefered option, we can start annoying users with more questions, or maybe not 😉

More about Recognition rather than recall usability issue and other usability heuristics.