What are good user prompts to nurture passkey creation?

What are the most effective passkey user prompts to increase passkey creation immediately after a successful login?#

The most effective passkey user prompts occur immediately after a successful login, when users are already in an authentication mindset. Prompting passkey creation at this precise moment leverages the user's current context, making them more likely to adopt passkeys compared to prompts in settings or banners within the application.

Best-Practice Examples#

Major enterprises have extensively tested and validated post-login prompts:

• Amazon observed a significant increase in adoption by automatically triggering prompts, especially on mobile, leading to up to 6× faster sign-ins.
• Google uses convenience-focused prompts like "Skip typing your password next time," proven through rigorous A/B tests with over 2.5 billion passkey sign-ins.
• Microsoft tailored their prompts to different personas and device segments, achieving steady adoption across diverse user groups.

Key Recommendations for Your Prompts#

To optimize your prompts effectively, follow these guidelines:

• Simple, clear messaging emphasizing convenience ("Faster sign-in, no passwords") or security ("Protect your account from phishing").
• A/B testing different messages to identify which resonate best with your audience.
• Controlled prompt frequency to avoid overwhelming users. Repeated prompts can increase adoption, but introduce a cooldown period (e.g., 30 days) after several skips to reduce friction.
• Different approaches for mobile and desktop: Automatic prompts on mobile can increase acceptance significantly (30–50% higher acceptance rates), while desktop prompts should generally be user-triggered to avoid intrusiveness.

Following these proven best practices ensures high adoption rates and helps you replace passwords with passkeys at scale, boosting security and improving user experience simultaneously.

Read the full article#

About Corbado

Corbado is the Authentication Intelligence Platform for CIAM teams running consumer authentication at scale. We help you see what IDP logs and generic analytics tools can't: where passkeys, passwords, OTP, social login and fallback journeys succeed, stall or fail, which devices and browsers create friction, and when an OS update silently breaks login. Two products: Corbado Observe layers process mining and observability across authentication journeys. Corbado Connect adds managed passkeys with analytics built in alongside your IDP. VicRoads runs passkeys for 5M+ users with Corbado (+80% passkey activation). Talk to a Passkey Expert →