From a user perspective, how does everyone here feel about magic links vs email and password?
Personally, I am torn.
As a developer, magic links are awesome. You put a new project online, and everyone on planet earth already is a user. Well everyone who has an email.
But from a user perspective, it is more cumbersome. For one because the switch between email and website. And because the typical magic link implementation invalidates the link after one use. So if I don't keep the cookie, I have to do the "enter email, receive email, click link" dance again. Entering my email and a password is faster.
There are users out there (likely even people that you know, because statistically it's a lot of people) that habitually never remember passwords and their login flow is almost always "Click Forgot Password, Enter Email, Receive Email, Click Link, Enter new Password they also won't remember" so from that perspective magic link flows save at least two steps!
Even power users that have trained themselves to use a password manager generally have more steps than they think they do to open the password manager, enter master passphrase/biometrics/etc, copy and paste the password.
said it before, but I love magic links. One more site where I dont have to create an username/password (and yes its a hassle, even with a password manager)
I'd rather use SSO over magic links as a user, for what it's worth.
Email is unreliable, there's typos, people not knowing their email address, etc. Meanwhile with SSO, two clicks and it logs you into the site with the email you're logged in with.
Personally, I am torn.
As a developer, magic links are awesome. You put a new project online, and everyone on planet earth already is a user. Well everyone who has an email.
But from a user perspective, it is more cumbersome. For one because the switch between email and website. And because the typical magic link implementation invalidates the link after one use. So if I don't keep the cookie, I have to do the "enter email, receive email, click link" dance again. Entering my email and a password is faster.