Don't underestimate the ability of non-technical people. Issuing membership numbers has been standard organisational practice for centuries and continues to work today for everything from airline loyalty schemes to international sports associations.
Case in point, I operate a service that uses numeric identifiers. Going by the helpdesk queries, our users are more likely to get their email address wrong than their membership number.
How often do your customers need access to these membership numbers, and how many such membership numbers do they deal with in their lives? If every service they used did the exact same thing as you do you think the error rate would still be so low?
And how often do they forget their numbers (rather than getting them wrong)?
These questions might make sense to me if the notion of a membership number was some strange new construct that we should adopt warily until proven to work.
It's amazing the results you get from treating your users like competent human beings rather than idiot cattle.
> These questions might make sense to me if the notion of a membership number was some strange new construct that we should adopt warily until proven to work. It's amazing the results you get from treating your users like competent human beings rather than idiot cattle.
All this snark just to dodge obvious questions about your approach?
Your demands for additional data have crossed into crude sealioning. I already offered the key data point that represents our concerns, viz. that users are more reliably remembering their membership number than an email address.
Speculation on the potential scalability of this approach seems absurd given that membership numbers have been successfully used by organisations of every scale for centuries.
Speculation on the potential scalability of this approach seems absurd given that membership numbers have been successfully used by organisations of every scale for centuries.
The concern is not with the scale of the organization, but with the number of organizations a user is a member of, which has exploded since website accounts appeared.
It really hasn’t. The number of organisations that wish to track people for marketing purposes has exploded, with all the unnecessary account creation that goes with it. That is not membership, and these are not organisations worth your engineering expertise.
Well, before the Internet I would never have needed an account in a club race management system; I would probably just have used a bunch of unwieldy papers.
While I don't disagree that there's a lot of useless account creation, I'm still member of at least magnitude more of useful online accounts that I or my parents ever were offline.
I would propose that maybe they can't remember their membership number, so are forced to look it up on a piece of paper. Whereas they believe they know their email, and maybe make typos.
I know that whenever I have to contact a service for which I only have a long numeric number I have some reference handy to make sure that I don't fuck it up.
> Your demands for additional data have crossed into crude sealioning. I already offered the key data point that represents our concerns, viz. that users are more reliably remembering their membership number than an email address.
Speculation on the potential scalability of this approach seems absurd given that membership numbers have been successfully used by organisations of every scale for centuries.
Case in point, I operate a service that uses numeric identifiers. Going by the helpdesk queries, our users are more likely to get their email address wrong than their membership number.