Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

smashingmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 178 posts

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#121

Post by blasdel »

aliglia wrote: post #22

I have never understood why I need to type my password twice. Inevitably I just copy what I wrote in the first box into the second. I'm also interested in the elimination of the post sign-up confirmation email. I'd rather get a "Welcome! If you didn't sign up for this service, click here" email, but I can imagine that if I didn't actually sign up for the service, I'd never want to "click here" for fear of spam. There…

Having to type your password twice is a perfect UI affordance -- it makes it obvious that you're signing up for a new account and not just logging in to an existing one.

It's especially important because a streamlined workflow will have both forms on the same page. It's infuriating to try to log in and get an "account already exists" error. HN is one of the very few sites that make this mistake.

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#122

Post by blasdel »

andypants wrote: post #18

Does anybody else think unmasking the password field is a terrible idea?

It's terrible in the biggest way you can fuck up your UI: doing the opposite of what every user expects

Billions of people are all used to typing into masked (or unechoed) password fields, having done so in a wide range of UIs a shitload of times. Typing into a password field and seeing it reflected back feels like a slap in the face, the security context is irrelevant, it's just a massive discourtesy.

Your website is not going to be the very first thing the user has ever logged into. It is not your place to try to reinvent such fundamental things, changing this on your site is on the same level of jackass hubris as reversing the tab order or mouse coordinate system with javascript. All you're going to do is infuriate people.

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#123

Post by prawn »

skx wrote: post #87
Hovertruck wrote: post #4

"Use a Question Mark Icon for the Password Recovery Link" Am I the only one who thinks that is really unintuitive? I don't even think clicking on that icon would cross my mind as a user, and I would spend my time trying to find the "Forgot Password" link.

The way that I've always handled this is to only show the "Forgot Password" link after a login attempt fails. Maybe that's unfair; expecting a user to attempt to login even if they're not sure of their details, but it always seemed reasonable enough to me.

One of the issues with a "forgot password" link is that it's visual clutter. Could only have the link show if the user has moused over the form area?

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#125

Post by prawn »

mauriciob wrote: post #118
lukifer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very, very curious to see hard numbers on this. Also, it's trivial enough to add a tag advising users to turn on Javascript (with a friendly "here's how" link), or you can do the work to degrade gracefully. Your conversion might drop for such users, but there's no reason it should go to zero.

Or you could add the Captcha in this case.

In which case, are most captchas going to screw blind people anyway?

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#126

Post by blasdel »

r00fus wrote: post #60
MatthewB wrote: post #52

These are all great suggestions. Smashingmagazine is a great resource for developers. I'm not quite sure about a checkbox to confirm password...maybe I need to see it actually implemented somewhere to know if I like it.

It's basically equivalent to the "show characters" checkbox in your wifi password entry.

That's there in the WiFi dialog for a very specific reason: you're usually typing in someone else's password, which is often being dictated to you as you type, so mistakes are inevitable.

In every other case it's your password that you type all the time (or paste). In the rare instance that you fuck up it's easier to enter it again than it is to fix it.

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#127

Post by wdewind »

arank wrote: post #40
pietro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's easier to correct something that's almost correct than to start over, and because it would help you determine if the username or the password was at fault.

And how do you know if someone was playing around with usernames or genuinely trying to login? I agree with 'dvdhsu' comment that if its a public service where others can see username its fine to load error form with username but if its a service where other users couldn't see your username its not a good idea to load error form with username irrespective of whether it was right or wrong.

Why does it matter? You assume the best and help the good guy, and in the worst case you don't help the bad guy.

You shouldn't be thinking about security in your validation anyway.

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#129

Post by count »

Xurinos wrote: post #21
andypants wrote: post #18

Does anybody else think unmasking the password field is a terrible idea?

No. It is something of a sham. It protects you from one use case: people watching the screen over your shoulder. It does not guard against people watching your fingers on the keyboard. It does provide a sense of security. I have no problem shielding the password with a hand over the screen, clicking the box, checking, and unclicking.

It also prevents copy/pasting out of that field by most browsers. If someone gets access to your computer because you walked away for a second, goes to your bank page and it autofills, they can access the site, but they can't know your password (which is generally shared between many sites), and so they can only do damage there locally for a (hopefully) brief period of time.

If it just displayed in a textbox, game over...

Re: Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

#130

Post by colanderman »

Regarding auto-completing the country field, most modern web browsers allow you to enter text in a drop-down field, and they will auto-complete for you. (Although last I checked, IE had the annoying tendency to simply choose an entry starting with each character you typed.)
Post reply on HN