Hall of Redirects

It’s time to go log in to the website to do the thing. After validating your credentials, you wait for a bit. Impatient, you look at the browser’s address bar, which is constantly changing, across multiple hostnames, and showing a variety of loading indicators, all while nothing is displayed on the page.

Eventually, you arrive at the landing page for the system and can go about your business.

Whatever the excuse, a process that sends a user through an extended tour of systems — presumably to set cookies, perhaps to validate security measures — often leads to increased wait times, and often more brittle experiences when some link in the chain is unavailable or is having performance problems for some reason.

I’ve noticed this pattern most on large company systems I’ve had to interact with, typically in health care. Other aspects of the user experience are often terrible as well, such that I believe the number of redirects one is directed through after logging into the system is correlated to the frustration one will experience when using the site.