I understand that companies want me to be a returning customer- but there are plenty of reasons and situation where the customer will be a one time shopper and doesn’t need to have an account created. For example, if I buy a knitting set from knittersworld.com for my Aunt tillie for X-Mas. Please… spare me the time of answering how often do you knit?” type questions just to ship this thing off.

And to make matters worse, as you mention in another recent post here- you always have different rules, logins, passwords and pwd rules that make remembering any login information for smaller, niche sites almost pointless. I almost always immediately click the “forgot your password” link to run the guantlet of options there, and they end up emailing me. Why can’t I use my email address for my login (like amazon)?

After a little grey matter abuse (and watching people fumble with the Amazon style login), I’ve implemented a bit of unobtrusive Javascript that hides the password field, until the ‘I am a returning customer’ radio button is clicked; it then shows the password field and puts focus on it.

Clicking on the I am a new customer radio button then hides the password field again.

If the customer doesn’t have javascript (about 8-10% of the clients customers), they just get the standard amazon style interface.

Would you consider this a good solution, as it seems to improve the customer experience and keep the client happy?

A Collection of Login/Register Screens

I see that Amazon has tweaked and simplified their interface since 2004-02-04.