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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?