Building Delightful and Branded Identity Experiences for Your Users with Okta Customisation
Our vision is to take Okta beyond identity and access management by providing delightful and secure experiences for our users to manage their identity -- both for employee end users who use Okta to sign into their emails, and customers who trust Okta to protect their identity with the applications they sign-up for. At Okta, we view our customisation features as a large role in building those memorable registration and sign-in experiences for our end users.
In the past, for our customers to use Okta to help their users sign into their applications, there were two ends of the spectrum. For teams with developers and resources, they could use our developer APIs to integrate Authentication and User data into complex user flows and unique applications. For teams that only wanted minor UI changes, for primarily employee user cases, they could use our out-of-the-box customisations such as adding a logo, editing the copy, or setting a color theme.
We have been proud of our investments in the Okta Sign-in Widget, an open-sourced JavaScript library that provides a fully featured and customisable login experience which can be used to authenticate users on any website. However, this also required the developer to download, customise, and host the sign-in application themselves.
But this has been enough of a burden for both developers and IT admins to limit their ability to encourage better security for the users they care about: there are developers and admins that wanted to use Okta to take care of protecting and managing their users so they could focus on their own applications without worrying about hosting, or there are IT admins that want to own the full branding of their employee or partner experiences to foster trust, but don’t have the resources to build that from scratch.
Hence why we are excited about these incoming customisation features that will allow anyone to build amazing identity experiences (e.g. sign-in, MFA, registration) out of the box, completely redesigned to your desired look and feel, and custom-branded to your company, and live for users to start on within 20 minutes.
Custom URL domains
Our Custom URL feature allows Okta admins to configure an Okta org with a custom domain. For example: If ExampleCorp currently uses "https://example.okta.com" to log in to their Okta org, this feature will allow them to use any domain they control instead such as "https://sso.example.com".
Okta-hosted custom sign-in widget
The Okta-hosted custom sign-in widget allows you to transform the look and feel of the Okta Sign-in experience -- both the Sign-in Widget and the HTML of the page. You can change the language, add additional fields, or modify images and fonts to match your corporate image, with a page that is hosted by Okta. Note that Custom URL domains is a prerequisite for this feature. Check out this video for further details.
Okta-hosted custom error pages
To keep the branded and consistent customer experience even in your end users’ unhappy paths, we also allow you to own and customise the HTML of your error pages. You can customise what end users see when they hit an error page, and customise the message to help them return to the successful path. Note that Custom URL domains is a prerequisite for this feature.
Gallery of widgets
Curious what can be done?
See how our customers are using it. At Oktane18, we heard from customers on how they're building “ridiculously good looking experiences”.
Get started. These are Early Access features. To enable them, please contact Okta Support. New to Okta? Start your free trial here.
We are always interested in your feedback, if you have any suggestions or questions regarding this feature, please don't hesitate to reach out via this email.