Creating a Separate New User vs. Returning User Form

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1

We have a portal glide page set-up with a number of users who check in every 1-2 months. We are having an issue where users are creating new accounts rather than logging onto their old account. This seems to be because they have multiple e-mail addresses and forgot which one they originally signed-up with.

The issue seems to be that the initial landing page screen that requires a sign in, doesn’t alert users that they are creating a new account.

Essentially, is there a way to create a landing screen that splits off the new and returning user workflow?

Or I guess any best practices on how I can hide the main content unless someone is signed in.

2

There wouldn’t be a way to know which email they previously signed-in with when they’re not signed-in though.

You can have a public section, say a tab that shows regardless of whether the user is signed-in or not.

For your “gated” content, set the tab/component visibility to when “signed-in user’s email” is not empty.

That won’t solve your “returning user” problem though.

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3

Thanks for the reply. This all makes sense, but the issue is still quite frustrating. I tried to move the content between a front and back-end, but in the end, it doesn’t actually fix the problem at all.

Essentially, users cannot easily tell if they are logging in with an existing account, or creating a new account. Even if I move the logon screen to be in a different place, the problem remains. Essentially, in a normal system, if a user inputs an e-mail that wasn’t previously registered, they would get an alert to try again or “create a new account.” Instead here, a new user is immediately created for the new address and then the user is surprised that none of their old information is showing.

They need to keep guessing accounts to make sure they log on to the right one. In a normal system the guess would quickly tell them “this account doesn’t exists, do you want to register?” but instead here, it just registers them and adds an extra few steps before the user realizes the account is empty (if they even do). We are getting a few emails per day from users who forgot which address they registered with.

So, my new question, is there a way to alert users when they are creating a new account before the new account is created?

4

I think the only way to get what you want would be to switch the privacy settings of your App to only allow users that are “pre-registered” to sign in. This could be users in the users table, or some other table (a whitelist). So something like the below:

privacy
privacy582×1356 105 KB

This would achieve your goal, as users that tried to sign in with some other email address wouldn’t be able to. The downsides would be:

  • you would have to manually add the email address of each user before they could sign in (although there are ways this could be automated)
  • every user that signed in would be considered a private user, so plan limits might come into play.
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5

Yes, we still want users to be able to register, we just want them to be able to know if they are registering a new account or logging into an existing account.