“Maze of pages, redirects, and confirmation emails”

Nikita Prokopov on his fun Tumblr-like site Grumpy Website that collects UI transgressions with light commentary:

Why log in when you have to, when you can instead experience the same Kafkaesque maze of pages, redirects, confirmation emails, copying codes, and searching for a second device—all a week in advance?

I agree with authentication experiences being absolutely horrible, especially in the corporate context. But I think the “your login expires in 5 days” callout is actually positive. Your reauthentication will happen anyway according to the security regimen. Instead of it potentially surprising you at a wrong moment – for example just before, or in the middle of the presentation in front of a boss – you could get ahead on that process during the next moment of downtime, and have some peace of mind.

I know Slack has a similar warning, although I don’t happen to have a screenshot handy; I imagine a few other places do, too.

(However, that gesture doesn’t give apps permission to handle expiring credentials badly. There should be no excuse for losing anything the user is doing – for example writing a long comment – just because the reauthentication kicks in in the middle of them doing that. Even the app losing its mind for a while just as its separate parts are waking up to the reality of reauthentication at their own pace and throwing strange errors, but the login screen hasn’t reappeared yet, can be really confusing.)