Improving the user experience by reducing login friction is one of our primary goals of Passage. The best applications make it quick and easy for users to get logged in, no matter how they arrive at the website. Over the last few weeks, we have heard several requests for more flexibility in delivering that login experience. After talking with users to learn about their unique use cases, we’ve come to understand the need for embedding authentication into a variety of different types of content - custom emails, in-app chat messages, and more.
To solve these challenges, we are excited to announce Embedded Links - a simple and flexible way to create magic links and deliver them to users any way you want, without affecting the security or user experience of our primary login and registration workflows. With Smart Links, your users will log in to your application even faster, and you can seamlessly integrate biometric authentication into all of your communications with users.
With Embedded Links, you can now embed magic links into any part of your application or business, from customized emails to in-app chat messages to product pages of your website. Embedded links can be generated through our Management API or using one of our backend SDKs. You simply provide either a Passage User ID, email address, or phone number to identify the user, and Passage will generate a unique, one-time use magic link for the user. If you provide an email address or phone number for a user that doesn’t exist, Passage will create the user for you.
When a user clicks the link, they will immediately logged into the application and directed to their content without needing to provide their email address or phone number. This creates the most frictionless possible login experience without compromising the security you get with Passage.
There are so many unique use cases for smart links. In fact, we use smart links at Passage! You can see it in action in the Admins section of the Passage Console. When you invite a new admin to your application, they receive a welcome email from Passage that includes a link to sign in to their account. Until now, the email just contained a link to our login page, but with embedded links, it was trivially easy to embed a magic link in the invitation emails. This removed the need for users to enter their email to login and gets users into our application faster!
There are plenty of other interesting use cases for this feature and we have a few more examples discussed in detail in our documentation. Let us know what else you are going to build with Embedded Links!
Sign up at the Passage Console to get started using secure, flexible authentication in your application. To learn more, you can read our full walkthrough of using embedded links in our docs.
As always, we are in Discord if you have any questions or feedback!