The Login Process

The process of registering for a new service on the internet is okay, until you’re asked for a password.

We’ve all been there, right? You need a password just to try out the service. Some people end up not signing up because of this. Some others just input an easy-to-guess password and they never change it. That’s generally not possible nowadays (and for a good reason!). Unfortunately, this means you need to come up with a strong password with several digits, both lowercase and uppercase characters, number, special characters, etc. You know you shouldn’t use that super strong password you have for other personal use services, but these restrictions left you debating, didn’t they? A few will certainly create a new strong password for each service, but that likely means they have to write them down somewhere in order to remember them all.

Solutions to this pain point exist, namely social logins and password managers. With social logins you use your account at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc as your ID into the new platform/service. That really lowers the hurdle to login into new platforms. On the other hand, you might not necessarily want to have any of these entities linked to all the other services you use. Furthermore, sometimes you might not even be sure what’s being shared. Password managers are another approach, which tends to work better in closed environments (e.g., Apple).

What if we eliminated the password overall?

That's exactly what we did, and in order to see how our solution works, let us first remember the access points we have. You’re essentially either gathering data (through Fidgrove DataLogger, a desktop app installed on the computer with the simulation software) or accessing it (through Fidgrove Engineering Station, accessible with a browser).

The first time you register for an account at Fidgrove, you will be asked for 4 things: (i) name; (ii) email; (iii) your birthday; and (iv) your country. You then receive an email with a 24h valid code to log in, and a link for convenience. You can then use it as you first log into the platform (i.e., Engineering Station) with a browser, and to the DataLogger (after downloading it from the platform).

In the most common scenario, you’ll be using your personal device to browse, and your home computer where you use your sim. As such, as long as you access Fidgrove with reasonable frequency (e.g., at least once a month), an active token is maintained and there is no need for your to log in again, even after shutting down the computer.

You can always log out at any time, obviously. When that’s the case, you just input your email address in the login process, and receive a new temporary code to login.

In everything we do, we believe in thinking deep on what’s the best thing for the user interaction. With this login process, we are aiming at getting the login as simple as possible, while maintaining the flexibility for our platform to be used in different scenarios as public computers/sims. We are very close to have more news on opening our platform, so stay tuned!