You Shall Not Pass

Yesterday Twitter released the Digits login for websites as part of Twitter Fabric. Digit is a tool that rules out the need for passwords. Instead it uses mobile numbers to verify a user account.

So how does it work? In order to use this, you will need to have a corresponding app for your website. Users will still need to sign up on your app first in order to login to your website through Digits. This will then allow you to see a prompt when you go to the website. When first logging in you will need to confirm your mobile number via an SMS confirmation code. Once this is done that’s it. You never have to login on your mobile again. It also means that you will be automatically logged in to any other websites that use Digits.   

 

But is choosing a password a point of friction though? Sure it’s an another step when signing up however it’s so engrained in the sign up process of any account based website that we don’t think twice about having to enter one. There’s plenty of things I get annoyed about in terms of sign up processes.

Captchas

 

Er what?

 

 

Come again?

Confirming passwords

 

Oops -_-

Telling us after we hit submit that a password must have one number, one capital letter and must rhyme with pony.

...

But not entering a password at all? If the reason for creating this is so that you don’t have to spend time creating a password, wouldn’t it take more time to enter your mobile number, wait for a confirmation code and then enter it in? It would save time as you won’t be required to login each time you access the site again but for some sites there is a certain sense of security I have when required to login.

Then again it would prevent us from choosing common passwords in order to memorise them for multiple sites. SplashData announced that the top two commonly used passwords of 2014 were ‘123456’ and ‘password’. ‘Qwerty’ was shortly after that.

Then what if your phone number changed? Twitter has stated that users will still be able to be tracked even if they change their phone number, however currently it looks like you need to go to the Digit website in order to change it.

It’s definitely a big change taking out the login step, but will users embrace this? Time will tell.