Login User Experience Overview

The login user experience is a critical factor for users who interact with your digital services. Login screens are one of the first impressions that users have with your product. In addition to security, you will want the experience to feel simple and understandable.

Users authenticate when they sign up to your digital service, after which they frequently sign in. The experience must be resilient so that users can recover their account or change authentication methods. The screens that you present should feel fast, modern and align with your brands.

To deliver modern experiences and meet your particular requirements, you need a flexible login system with rich customization options. This overview summarizes some key capabilities of the Curity Identity Server, that you should use to design your next generation login experiences.

Themed Login Screens

When you get started with the Curity Identity Server, configure one or more user authentication methods. For example, email verification is often a convenient and reliable option to activate a user's account. Use the Admin UI Look and Feel Editor to quickly configure your preferred colors and logo. You then get branded login screens that use responsive layouts across devices and orientations.

The Admin UI enables you to create multiple themes and assign them to distinct sets of OAuth or SAML clients. More generally, the Curity Identity Server provides multiple customer-facing frontends, including the User Self Service Portal, where users can manage their authentication factors.

All customer-facing frontends use a unified theming system. You can go beyond the capabilities of the Admin UI editor, and implement Extended Look and Feel Customization with UI Kit. That tutorial explains the UI Kit and its development setup, to enable fast feedback during styling customizations. It also explains how you can use the templating system to deploy web assets.

Labelling and Localization

Labels and text can play a key role to enable modern login user experiences and avoid potential confusion. For example, almost all users dislike the experience of having to create yet another password when they sign up to an online service. To create a more positive impression you can upgrade to passwordless logins.

The most convenient option is usually passkeys, where the user only needs to provide a gesture to authenticate. However, the default experience with passkeys can abruptly present system dialogs that might confuse the user and prevent them from signing in. The Curity Identity Server therefore provides a landing page with clear labelling.

Sometimes, users can be hesitant to use newer authentication methods, due to fear of getting locked out. To alleviate that concern, labelling should clearly inform the user that they can recover their account. For example, the Curity Identity Server's passkeys landing page informs the user that if they ever switch machines and lose their passkey, they can easily register a new one.

You can easily use the techniques from the UI Kit tutorial to add extra labels, or links to your own website. For example, if you think your users might struggle to understand passkeys system dialogs, you could provide a Passkeys Step-by-Step page, to tell the user exactly what options to select.

The UI Kit enables customer-facing screens to use localized text, for your regional customers or those in future markets. For example, you can use Right-to-Left Language Support to present clear login screens to the 400+ million native RTL speakers around the world.

API Driven Logins

The Curity Identity Server supports both traditional HTML-driven logins and also API-driven logins. The latter is enabled by the Hypermedia Authentication API for OAuth clients. HAAPI clients receive the data for login screens as JSON API responses, and dynamically render these HAAPI representations as login screens using client-side SDKs.

For many use cases, the use of API-driven logins instead of HTML-driven logins removes the need to switch to the system browser, which improves the user experience. For example, the system browser provides no security benefits to a mobile app that uses email activation for user signup and passkey logins afterwards. Instead, the mobile app can use native passkeys to authenticate users.

For all logins screens you can use JavaScript to customize frontend logic. HAAPI clients enable customization of frontend logic with the most modern frontend technologies, to align with the stacks developers use to develop their apps. This alignment can help to enable deeper frontend login experience customizations, while continuing to integrate with the unified theming system.

Deeper Login Customizations

A key behavior of the Curity Identity Server is that you are never blocked when you run into deeper customization requirements, like implementing different login flows for distinct sets of users, e.g. your internet customers and authorized employees. The key building blocks for deeper customizations are Authenticators, Authentication Actions and External Identity Providers.

For example, you might need a custom authentication method to sign users up, that scans a passport and uses a third-party service to verify the user's identity. Alternatively, you might need to integrate with a legacy authentication system. For such use cases, you can implement completely bespoke authenticators with the Java / Kotlin plugin SDK.

When you implement plugins, they integrate with the unified theming system, so that you can present each custom form multiple times with different themes. Plugins can also return HAAPI representations, to enable use during API-driven flows, to best serve the needs of your applications and development teams.

Cloud Native Technology

The Curity Identity Server uses cloud native deployment, which provides full technical control to developers who work on UX improvements. You can develop and operate customizations locally with the same mechanisms that you use for deployed systems. This quality enables early local computer testing of any type of login user experience customization, with fast feedback.

The following tutorials use a shared deployment that runs real login flows locally, with theming customizations. The local deployment includes the maildev tool, to enable a local test setup where you can create test users and use email verification for any test user.

• Single Brand Customization Example
• Multi-Brand Customization Example
• Email Customization Example

Once you understand the techniques, you can adapt them to your own use cases and test all aspects of user login journeys, from signup through to login and account recovery.

Conclusion

Delivering successful login user experiences can require more than just theming. You typically need to build reliable login user journeys for distinct sets of users. For best results, login UX should also integrate with applications and the developers who build them. Your login user experiences should also be future-proof and support newer methods, like the ability to integrate with citizen wallets.

The Curity Identity Server enables you to take complete control over the finer details of login user experiences. Start with one or more themes, to align with your brands. Then, use labelling techniques that avoid user confusion. With those foundations, you are well-placed to implement high security logins with minimal user friction.