re: Log In or Sign up?

The award for this week’s “so obvious and brilliant that it took the Internet fifteen damn years to figure out how its done” award goes to Leah Culver, who came up with the simplest, fastest, minimalist & most effective login form ever devised. The steps involved for the user:

1. Put in the email address.
2. Select either “I have an account” or “I’m new!”
3. Put in a password and log in.

It’s brilliant because it involves no more additional work on the user’s part to create an account. Leah’s solution is about as painless as it can possibly get.

Granted, I would take a page from the Amazon login page and spell it out a little more for the less Internet-savvy, like by saying “Choose a password to create an account!” instead of just “Choose a password”. That’s just me being nit-picky, though. I hope to see more sites adopt this process.