NPR Sign-In Redesign
NPR’s inconsistent, clunky sign-in system was a pain for audience members and product teams.
As a result, audience members didn’t realize they had one account across all products. Why would they? There wasn’t even design consistency for the same app on different platforms.
An example: when already-registered NPR One users tried to sign up on NPR.org, they’d be greeted with a good ol’ “that account already exists” message with no other context. Fun!
It was equally frustrating for product teams who were confronted with inaccurate, insufficient user data.
I led all design strategy and execution for NPR’s first platform-agnostic, privacy-considerate authentication system.
Y’all, there were so many more variations of this. It was bonkers.
After auditing all sign-in experiences, sketching, and usability testing, we landed on a delegated approach.
This way, audience members would no longer need to remember where — or if — they’d already registered.
The logic behind the new authentication system would do that for them, supported by a consistent visual treatment and UX copy across all experiences. It also ensured accessible experiences for folks using screen readers across platforms.
As a result, we saw a sizable increase (metric coming once I find it in the archives!) in sign-in activity on NPR.org.
We were also able to capture more accurate user data in our CRM and design a path forward for progressive engagement, which would allow users to have full control over their information & tell us only what they wanted us to know about them.
