Tian Bai

How to name users?  Should your website ask users to specify a unique username, or just some nickname at their will?  It matters.  It impacts how your users connect with their friends or other users on your website, so you should align the user naming mechanism with how you want them to use your website, which should eventually line up with your business model.

There are usually three items which users can specify to name themselves:

• Email – has to be unique; serves best as login credential, since users are unlikely to forget it; cannot serve as the public name due to privacy
• Username – has to be unique; once set, cannot be changed; serves best as the homepage ID (e.g. my homepage on Live Space is ‘tian-bai.spaces.live.com‘, where ‘tian-bai’ is the Username serving as the homepage ID); users are unlikely to pick their favorite due to shrinking namespace and typically exclusive support to English letters and digits
• Nickname – whatever users design themselves to be; not unique; can be changed at will

Moving forward in this article, I’ll be using the 3 terms based on the definition above, although sites may use some derivatives/hybrids.

Some case studies:

• Facebook – Email required; Username not supported; Nickname being just the full name in the real life.  This is determined by the core idea of Facebook – people connect/socialize based on what they knew about each other in the real life, so virtual stuff like Username/Nickname do not help.
• Douban – Email required; Nickname required; Username being optional. Its user naming mechanism is so considerate that worth closer insight:
  • During registration, users only need to tell three things – Email, password and Nickname.  Email cannot be changed afterwards, while Nickname can be changed at will.  The registration is so easy that even someone mistakenly clicked the "sign up" button would be able to make it through
  • As one of its missions/features, Douban does encourage users to express themselves on it via blog, reviews, collections, etc. and conveniently share those, so it gives users an *option* to specify a unique, representative Username as the homepage ID (even if users didn’t specify the Username, their homepages would still be linked by static URI’s, which should be the minimum requirement).  Douban also understands that to find such a Username may be hard, so very thoughtfully, it makes this step optional and delayed until post registration.
  • When posting comments, users appear as their Nicknames. In case Nicknames conflict, users can still use their image thumbnails to distinguish from others.

In all, my recommendation would be:

• Email – to have as login credential, as most of the time it is required during registration anyway.
• Username – Nice to have if your users’ homepage/space on your website should be visited, by just one click from anywhere.  In addition, a meaningful username as part of the URI (e.g. tian-bai.spaces.live.com, picasaweb.google.com/tian.ab) gives users much stronger feeling of ownership.
• Nickname – to have if users interact a lot on your website, e.g. forum, community, etc.

If your website uses all 3 of them, I strongly recommend you to take a look at douban’s decent mechanism.