Jakob bases his rationale on the fact that there is usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in so masking the password is only serves to increase the chance of user error. But what about the times when somebody is looking over your shoulder. What do you do then? Jakob says that you should add a checkbox to your login form so that people can choose whether to mask their password. I think this adds unnecessary weight to the login form – another thing for the user to consider when logging in.

What about the registration form? There’s usually nobody peering over your shoulder when you’re registering so it seems like a more reasonable place to display passwords in clear text. By doing so you could remove the need for the retype password field but I wonder how much of the username + password + retype password pattern users look for when scanning a registration page (that often also contains a login box).

It seems that Jakob’s thinking is based on things he’s observed while testing mobile devices. I agree that typing passwords on a mobile device can be tricky because of the small format keyboard but I wonder if it isn’t the responsibility of the operating system or hardware to solve that particular problem. The iPhone does a great job of both masking and displaying a password – but that’s done on the phone, not the website.

It’s a tricky one but the fact that I’ve never thought of it as a problem and have never observed or read about anyone actually complaining about it leads me to conclude that it ain’t broke so let’s not fix it.

What do you think?

<resurrect_blog>

While not a post about user experience per se, I figure that as it’s about our user experience of life, it’s relevant to this blog. That, and I’ve really got nowhere else to post it.

What if we could save the world by buying stuff? It’s a thought that popped into my head this evening and the more I think about it, the more it seems like a winner. It seems odd that it hasn’t already been done, so I’m sure there’s something glaringly obvious that I’m missing. Perhaps you, dear reader, can tell me what it is. If not, then let’s do it.

The idea is that non profit organisations operate as normal businesses, with all profits going to charity. I’m not talking about your traditional NPO that does work for a particular cause, I’m taking about a normal business that is different only because of where the profits go.

What is stopping a business like this from operating in every sector and industry? Look at your big banks, they’re make billions of dollars profit – even during these tough times. Westpac’s net profit for the six months to March 31 2009 was $2.175 billion!

From a consumer point of view, I reckon people would be queueing up to move their business to organisations that gave their profits to charity. I’d bank with “The Charity Bank” as long as I knew it was a well run and regulated bank and that $2.175 billion was going to charity every 6 months. I’d do my grocery shopping at Worldworths. I’d stay at Shareiton hotels. I’d by petrol from Better Planet (BP).

And, as far as competition goes, prices would be lower than those of ‘normal’ competitors because NPOs don’t have to pay income tax like ‘normal’ companies do and there’s no shareholder pressure to raise prices or fees to make a bigger profit. You’d get a better deal as a customer AND you’d be helping people by purchasing.

With an NPO operating like this in every market, industry and sector, there’d be so much money going to good causes that we could do something about distributing wealth more effectively and giving to people all over the world.

Why does this seem so obvious? What am I missing?

UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube which is sad. I’ll try to track down another version.

What would happen if a large corporation had to design the stop sign? This video has a look at “The Process” with an alarming result!

The team here are divided. 1/2 think that as the application needs to convey a number of states to the user, the choice of colour needs help the user build a mental model. There people are leaning towards the green is available, yellow is mine and grey is unavailable. The other 1/2 are in favour of using the brand colours (pink and blue) to convey available/unavailable. All agree that grey is a good colour for unavailable.

My preference is for the yellow/green approach but I’m certainly no marketer.

What do you think? Is there a reason why you would favour one approach over the other?

Having just completed a project with Hiser, I was very impressed with their process, methodology, professionalism and documentation. Although we haven’t yet developed the product they assisted us with, you get the feeling that it will be well received by users and will have a positive impact on the business. The research and collaborative design process has ironed out issues with the interface and further testing closer to launch should ensure that the product is fit for purpose and well received.

Contrasting this approach with Facebook’s mini-feed mini-disaster it is clear to me that there is a point in every business (especially a Web 2.0 startup) where what has always worked suddenly fails. It is not possible or necessary for a startup to invest as much in research and UCD as a larger business with established clients. The mantra of the 2.0 startup has been “Deploy, test, refine”. But, what is the catalyst that changes that? In Facebook’s case it was the revolting (as in up in arms, not disgusting) users who were very rapidly very many.

It’s not surprising at all that Facebook’s designers were out of touch with who their users were and what they wanted. In the incredibly rapid growth do you think anyone at Facebook had the time or inclination to slow things down by doing some formal user profiling or research. Facebook has been all about geting it out. Fast!

What this case highlights is that at some stage, the users suddenly matter a whole lot more than they previously did. I doubt that there will be any long term damage to the Facebook brand as a result of this, but I’ll bet that they have started to think a lot more deeply about the implications of their deployments and will be more rigorous in their research and testing with users.

Content and structure are still vitally important, but with well segmented (chunked) content and a design that supports scanning, I have finally found some research that will help reduce the need to “get it above the fold”.

Anyone else think that the bit with the rings in it looks like a map of Australia? They even put the ‘TM’ where TasMania should be. How thoughtful!

If you want to work with a ‘brand’ for your olympic games, how about grabbing those rings, slapping 2012 and London on them. Can I have a million please?

I attended a session run by Shane Morris at Microsoft on Wednesday titled “The Age of User Experience“.

The first half of the presentation was a good session by Shane and Stamford Interactive. Concise, to the point and engaging. Very well done.

The second half was a shameless plug of the Expression Suite and a demonstration of Expression Web and Blend. From what I gathered, Microsoft are trying to convince the interface/interaction designers that they can use products like Expression Web and Blend as a replacement from traditional documentation. I like the thinking but can’t get past the fact that designers generally don’t know or care about XML, (X)HTML, CSS, Data Binding or scripting. Further, although Expression Web apparently produces standards based code, the demonstration I saw showed me that without knowledge of CSS we will end up replacing tag soup with class soup. Every style was applied as a class, there was no mention of semantics or document structure.

I won’t go into details as I don’t want to flame anyone but the Expression Web demonstration was terrible. Shane did pull it together for the Blend demo and while I liked and understood it all , I think I was in the minority as most of the attendees didn’t have the development background that I have.

Although I won a copy of Expression Web for asking the best question (along the lines of my points above), I think the best point was made by another attendee who worried that giving designers the power to become ‘micro coders’ is very dangerous. If you know a little bit about a subject, you are likely to do a bad job. Designers hat the fact that everyone thinks they are a design expert. Imagine the effect of making everyone an HTML/CSS expert. I can picture the IT team taking over the files created by the designers and throwing their arms up at the state of the code produced by the WYSIWYG Expression Web interface.

Communication between designers and developers is the key to success here, not trying to make designers developers and vice versa. I’d love to see Microsoft tackling the documentation issue and building innovative tools that supported stronger inter-team communication, rather than trying to play catch up with Adobe. How about some sort of tool that would allow us to provide better design documentation. Could it plug into VSTS? Have tabs for screenshot, interactions, exceptions/errors, etc etc… The key is supporting people’s current methods and providing tools to enhance the experience, rather than trying to make people do things they are not trained to do.

Shane drilled the point “Same data, differentiated experience”. I’d like to see “Same methods, differentiated development experience” come out of Microsoft.

As a designer, you are fighting hard to try to come up with a better way but you keep coming back to your competitors solution, the one that has nailed it.

At what point do you stop pulling your hair out and admit that you are unable to come up with a better way of doing something? Further, what do you do at that point? Do you:

1. Reapply with pride – effectively copy what your competition has done
2. Deliver a weaker offering – effectively conceed defeat to your competitor in order to ensure you won’t be accused of copying?

The answer is often controversial, as evidenced by the Yahoo! vs. Digg debate from a few weeks ago, but I maintain that there is nothing wrong with accepting the fact that someone else got something right before you did – as long as it doesn’t happen all the time.

Sometimes it is difficult to know whether you are suffering a creative block or whether there really is not a better way. Ask your peers to help, more often than not, they will help spark some creativity but sometimes, all you can do is say “well done Competitor X, the best I can do is mimic”.