Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Better login UX

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

I’ve upgraded the login UX (user experience) for PainSci members. Since introducing the membership program last fall, patches of content set aside just for members have popped up all over the site, and I wanted members to be able to unlock and reveal those areas without leaving the page, or even reloading.

And now you can: Login right at a paywall and 💨 poof! The locked content just automagically zaps into view. Slick.

Before, when you came across a members-only section and realize you weren’t logged in, you had to (1) go to a separate login page, (2) go to your email, (3) click a confirmation link, (4) manually go back to the page where you started, and — this was the real insult to me — (5) still reload and scroll back to where you began. Sheesh! That was kind of ridiculous, and good riddance. Did it work? Yes. Was it good? No.

Here are three examples for members to try out. Each of these pages has a significant members-only section, and these links will take you right to the paywall:

(What if you’re logged in already? You can logout with a secret shortcut: type Alt-Shift-L, then reload the page. Nope, you cannot log in like that! It only goes one way!)

Improvements like this will likely accelerate over the next few months, as investments I have made in modernization of the PainScience.com code base start to bear fruit. In particular, I am making some good things happen surprisingly easily using Alpine.js, “a rugged, minimal tool for composing behavior directly in your markup. Think of it like jQuery for the modern web.”

Obviously, please do let me know if you have any issues, or just comments on the new UX.

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher