Challenging User Migration Problem

Our team has a challenging UX issue we are trying to solve neatly. We have rebuilt an existing system from scratch and there is a technical constraint that old users will need to re-register to the new system to access their information (there is a shared code between the two systems that will help identify them). To make things more tricky, there was a period of about 6 months where both systems were running, and some clients were on the old system and some were signed up to the new system.

Four bands of users have been identified.

  1. Users who signed up to the old system before the new system existed
  2. Users who signed up to the old system while both systems were running
  3. Users who signed up to the new system while both systems were running
  4. Users who signed up to the new system after the old one stopped.

The old site was switched off a couple of weeks ago which means there will be many users from band 1 and 2 who are trying to use login credentials that are no longer valid and they will need to re-register. The new system has been running in parallel for 6 months so there is a large grey area of users that could belong to either system

The main issue

the trouble is there are two messages we need to get across, one for old system users and one for new system users but our clients are unlikely to know what system they are on.

  1. they could have the wrong username / password due to typo
  2. they could have the wrong username / password due to it being an old/invalid account.

we don't want users of the new system re-registering unnecessarily and we don't want users of the old system getting trapped trying to reset/retrieve usernames and passwords which dont exist in the new system.

we have tried a few solutions, including alerting users to the issue but they barrel straight past the alerts and attempt to login, then get caught up trying to reset a username and password that doesnt exist. We are working on a help wizard to reduce support calls but thought it would be good to get some ideas/perspectives we havent thought of, thanks :)

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