Login & Signup Case Study
The busiest screen in the product, rebuilt to earn its traffic.
01 THE PROBLEM
Login could run four to four-and-a-half minutes, and a wrong password had nowhere to go - there was no forgot-password flow, so a mistyped password meant starting over or calling support. Nothing was instrumented, so nobody could say why the highest-traffic screen in the product was also the least understood. “Account 1 (SSO)” and “Account 2 (Without SSO)” let backend configuration leak straight onto the screen.
02 THE CONSTRAINTS
The redesign had to work with the system that existed, not an imagined clean slate.
03 THE REFRAME
Login is a funnel, not a screen. Measured properly, UI interaction was under ten seconds per step - OTP latency dominated everything else. The bottleneck was the system, not the screen, and it had been invisible only because nothing was counted. The screen itself got a second job: the marketing carousel could cross-sell the product.
04 THE FLOW
The journey became a sequence with one decision per state: identify the user, wait for verification, choose the organisation, then use the right authentication method. OTP latency remained a system constraint, but the interface now explains the wait instead of disguising it. Multi-tenant selection is recognisable, capped and recoverable rather than exposing backend policy.
05 EVERY STATE
One system had to cover ready, waiting, resolved, error and recovery moments without inventing a new layout each time. Inline errors make the next move clear; magic-link recovery gives people a way back without restarting the journey. Login and signup share the same visual grammar, while each terminal state keeps a single primary action.
06 MEASURED
Five funnel steps are instrumented end to end in Mixpanel. Only OTP entry crosses a minute; every other stage clears in under fifty seconds. Every measured stage also runs five to six seconds faster than before the redesign. On SSO, the most-used path, landing-to-login time fell by more than half: 75 seconds to 35. The breakdown made the remaining OTP infrastructure latency visible instead of blaming the interface for the wait.
07 BEYOND LOGIN
The busiest screen in the product became a distribution surface too. Mixpanel showed that between one in five and one in four sessions clicked from the login carousel into another product page. Some of that traffic later returned as new signups on those products, not only page views.