Your password has been emailed to you…

I don’t understand why so many websites do this, and I am sure you have run into this problem before.  You go to a website and you try all the various username/passwords that you can think of but no luck, so you are forced to use the “Forgot Password” or “Reset Password” links. Here is the problem, you probably spent a good deal of time finding what you were looking for, and then you need to login to get at “something”.  Either you want to reply to a forum post, download a file, etc.  Now you have to walk through a 2 or 3 step password reset process that takes you away from what you were trying to get at and you end at a page that says “Your password has been sent to you”, with no link on the page to get back to the place you were originally trying to go.

From a workflow perspective you can make your users much happier if you do two things:

1. Include a link in the password reset email to take you back to the original location you were trying to go to
2. Allow you to re-enter your email and password on the “Your password has been sent to you” page and take you back to your original location

This will save your users from spending another 10 minutes trying to get back to where they originally wanted to go.

Also, one other thing you can do to make your users happier…if you send the user a “reset” version of their password make it easier for them to set it back to something that they can remember.  Maybe suggest that on the landing page for the link they click in the email that they can change their password “here“.  This will prevent them from having to go through this negative user experience again the next time they try to login to your site.