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Just Let Me Write Digits

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Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#61

Post by jandrese »

abanana wrote: post #45
TonyTrapp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately Anecdotally, this seems to be the case on the majority of websites where I have to use such 2FA codes.

Santander's banking website uses both in some places, e.g. confirming a new payment. "Enter your 5-digit PIN and the 6-digit 2FA code we've just sent you", with 5 little input fields for the former, and a single standard input field for the latter. Perhaps a deliberate decision to make them look different, but it just looks like they couldn't make up their mind.

Or the input fields are provided by different widgets they downloaded from different places on the Internet.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#62

Post by jandrese »

msdz wrote: post #16
soneil wrote: post #9

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.

First off: I’m not really well-versed in terms of UX design, so these next guesses are as good as anyone’s: - Six boxes communicate “== six digits, != password” (try to imagine the least tech-savvy user) - Some people might not be able to quickly hold six digits in their head at once (especially seems to be the case with older people, from my experience), so seeing “I’ve already got two/three/four” visually is potent…

I think people were entering the SMS short code the digits were sent from instead of the digits so they wanted to make it clearer that it was 6 digits they want you to look for.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#63

Post by jandrese »

acheron wrote: post #23
kleiba2 wrote: post #2

Reading this makes me feel like we have not learned any lessons at all in software engineering and UI design since the 1980s.

There were lots of very in-depth UI studies in the 90s, which were implemented in the second half of the 90s and early 00s. Then someone let “designers” in the door and it was all thrown out.

While it started beforehand, it was really smartphones and especially the iPhone that gave so many UI guys an excuse to discard all of the studies of the past and start from scratch. "Oh, but it's a touch interface, these lessons are about mouse users, certainly discoverability and clearly differentiating UI elements don't apply anymore. Our users are so smart they will just know that a half swipe from the middle of the object is different than a half swipe from the edge, and they don't have to be told about functionality that is infused at birth now."

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#64

Post by [deleted] »

jandrese wrote: post #59
summarybot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually programmers use the symbols far more frequently than the numbers. The number row on Programmer Dvorak is, from left-to-right, & [ { } ( = * ) + ] ! # Looks really weird at first glance! but if you try it out, [square brackets] and (parens) are symmetrical fingers on opposing hands. By hand, [] is the ring fingers (2,0 on a qwerty). {} is (3,4 on the left-hand) and () is 5,8 aka your pointing fingers, left ha…

> Plus, the numbers are also split by hand! > From middle-going-out: > Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468 What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by…

[deleted]

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#65

Post by llm_nerd »

abanana wrote: post #55
llm_nerd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a worldwide perspective, it is incredibly uncommon, and just from the basics of this issue it is clearly uncommon in Switzerland as well. The standard keyboard layout in Switzerland is QWERTZ (across all of its language speakers). This website is generally only used by the Swiss. I mean, if a basic authentication mechanism of a critical government website doesn't work with a keyboard layout, odds are incredibly…

I'd understand a developer in e.g. America not being aware of it, but to one in Switzerland, France is right next door. A developer working on something as important as their government login system should be well aware of different keyboard layouts surrounding, and leaking into, their country.

Yes, I understand where France is relative to Switzerland. But the basic fact remains that not one of the developers or testers or stakeholders encountered this, and it was so rare apparently the very first person to encounter it -- given that it was literally a blocking issue, and not just some transient issue -- is the linked article.

Is it a regrettable bug that made a poor assumption that breaks in special cases? Sure. Is it "Dunning-Kruger" (groan), or some demonstration of how stupid the developers are? Give me a break.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#66

Post by recursivecaveat »

soneil wrote: post #9

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.

I wish they were just regular inputs. A significant portion of them I encounter have some kind of cursor navigation or paste bug. I think this mechanism is the perfect Goldilocks-zone control of simple enough that people rewrite it from scratch, but text input has enough hidden complexity that it's easy to get something wrong.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#67

Post by zanecodes »

msdz wrote: post #16
soneil wrote: post #9

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.

First off: I’m not really well-versed in terms of UX design, so these next guesses are as good as anyone’s: - Six boxes communicate “== six digits, != password” (try to imagine the least tech-savvy user) - Some people might not be able to quickly hold six digits in their head at once (especially seems to be the case with older people, from my experience), so seeing “I’ve already got two/three/four” visually is potent…

My equally uninformed guess is that the presence of six empty boxes communicates that the code entered must be exactly six digits long in a way that a generic text input doesn't. It clearly delineates the digits which makes it easy to see how many you've entered and how many are empty, and the presence of an empty box suggests that it needs to be filled while a number that's simply shorter than the input field doesn't. At least, that's my steelman; maybe browsers should check if a field's min-length and max-length are the same and style them similarly?

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#68

Post by Liquid_Fire »

llm_nerd wrote: post #65
abanana wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd understand a developer in e.g. America not being aware of it, but to one in Switzerland, France is right next door. A developer working on something as important as their government login system should be well aware of different keyboard layouts surrounding, and leaking into, their country.

Yes, I understand where France is relative to Switzerland. But the basic fact remains that not one of the developers or testers or stakeholders encountered this, and it was so rare apparently the very first person to encounter it -- given that it was literally a blocking issue, and not just some transient issue -- is the linked article. Is it a regrettable bug that made a poor assumption that breaks in special cases?…

> apparently the very first person to encounter it

We don't really know that.

It may have been the first person able to complain - given you couldn't even file a support ticket without getting through this prompt!

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#69

Post by fer »

abanana wrote: post #51
fer wrote: post #20

Same, but for dates. There's ; it's literally a solved problem ffs. Forcing to scroll through years, months and days in your remarkably creative date selection widget is extremely user hostile.

We had a discussion about this one not too long ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957 Unfortunately, with the mobile OS's datepickers being so bad from a usability perspective, it's a long way from being a solved problem. Typing the date directly into a single textbox is great for some of us but not for others, so an alternative has to be provided. Yes, some date selection widgets can be poorly designed…

I just tested on all the devices I have at hand and they let me pick or type, and the picker is usable. Is this an iPhone problem? Because it sounds like an iPhone problem.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#70

Post by wolrah »

frou_dh wrote: post #22

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

> Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

This is one of my most hated categories of pet peeves, software that does something in a way that causes a human to have to expend effort every time they use it which could easily be fixed by one-time effort on the developer's part, but the developer is either uninterested or hostile to the idea of fixing it. Computers exist to do the tedious stuff for us, if software makes us do tedious stuff for it that could be avoided with a bit more work on the software side then the software is wrong.

"Enterprise" software on Windows that "requires admin" has been a long time top subcategory here, where in literally 100% of cases I've ever dug in to in 20+ years of professional IT they could change a couple of default paths to point either within the user's private folders or a common user-accessible folder like ProgramData and solve it forever, but instead they tell people to give everyone local admin and people who don't know better actually listen to that idiocy while competent administrators are forced to fire up ProcMon and track down what it's doing so they can bodge around it by pushing out permissions changes or config changes through their management platform of choice.

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