New User Registration Process in Brandkit

To make the new Private account (no self-service logon or search without login) options available in Brandkit, we've had to overhaul the whole registration process, because when Private Account is turned on, all the login/registration steps had to happen before users hit the Portal. 

At the same time we wanted to streamline and simplify the registration process for users.

Now Registration is a 3 step process.

Step 1: Enter your email address

Step 2: Set your Password

Step 3: Complete your User Profile and accept Terms

Once the users Profile is complete and Terms of use are accepted, the user is logged in and ready to go.

New users are assigned to the default Standard Users role (unless the account is configured to use a custom role) and will have access to appropriate pages and assets.

The benefits of these changes are that we now send a validation/confirmation link as early as possible in the registration process and the flow for users is clear and a little more concise.

We can now also check whether an email address is already registered at step 1, rather than after the user has filled out an entire profile form unnecessarily.

In the interests of being DRY (Don't repeat yourself) in our codebase,  this also improves the process for Invitations by removing duplication in the backend.

For example, when a user receives an invitation they click a link to set their password and jump straight into the exact same process as a standard registration, but skip step1 (email address) because the host entered the email when sending the invitation.

Ditto for Social Login and Single Sign On (SSO) deployments (a new feature we'll talk about soon).

Logging in with Facebook, Google or some other SSO credentials will jump straight to step 3 (Enter profile info) - because step1 (email) and step2 (password) are handled by the network you are authenticating with.

Auto assignment of Role

There's another new feature that can be configured for accounts, that auto-assigns a particular User Role to new users based on their email domain.

For example: a user registering with an @acme.com email address can be auto assigned the Acme Staff user role, with access to Staff only resources.

We're using this feature for a government client, to auto assign users to a special Government Role when they register with a valid Government email domain.

Other benefits down the line, mean it's also easier now for us to customise the profile form for each account if necessary.

Overall this is an important (but mostly invisible) change, that will improve user on-boarding.

Enjoy :)