Kelly Smith | Made in Seattle

I’ve been doing the interface for an internal software project called ImageKind that we’ve been focused on over at Curious Office. The last few days, we’ve been developing a shopping cart from scratch because we want it to look and function exactly according to our specifications. One thing we debated was whether or not we would let people buy products without creating an account of any kind. For example, on www.art.com you can add a product to your cart and get all the way through the checkout process without actually providing a username and password. On other sites like Cafe Press you must eventually enter a password as a new customer although you do it at the very end of a bunch of other form filling (e.g. address, email etc) so you aren’t really realizing that you are creating an account by the time you enter (and confirm) your password. I debated how we would approach this for several hours. First, I thought that the goal should be to let people give you money via the lowest possible set of hurdles and that appeared to suggest that a username and password should be optional but not required. Then I realized that most of the work to purchase products is in fact entering mandatory information in the first place such as shipping address, billing address and credit card info. The extra few seconds to enter your email address once (as your username) and your new password twice (once and then again to confirm) is the easiest part! That bit takes about 8 seconds. Yet, once you do it, you get to skip having to enter all that other information next time you come back to the site. To me, that sounds like a reasonable trade off. But, users need to understand all these benefits of having an account. It isn’t immediately obvious. How about order tracking? Stored data. Address books. All that in exchange for an extra 8 seconds to provide a password. In our case, we’re requiring an email as username and password for those who want to make a purchase. I think it’s the right choice.