Some Hard Lessons in User Interface Design
How the UI for a login screen was fixed ...
"When you register for the Holidailies portal you must select a username and a password. They become your credentials to post to the portal. We normally have a few cases of forgotten logins on opening day. This year, however, we had a significant number of people—nearly 5% of the registrants—reporting login problems.
Developers tend to blame the stupid users when problems occur. But when it's 5% of the users reporting problems you can't even try to trot out that lame excuse. Typically, these problems arise due to flaws in the user interface (UI). I believe that's exactly what happened in Holidailies. The registration difficulties probably resulted from two bad UI decisions that I made.
This year, we used nearly the same registration process as last year. The only thing we changed was the way that we assigned usernames. Last year, when you registered for the portal you had to choose a username and enter it into an empty form field. This year we provided a default username value. When you entered your contact email address into the form it also was copied (by the magic of javascript) into the username field. That provided a default value that you could choose to keep or change. A significant number of people (114 out of 165) chose to keep the default." continued ... (Via Chromium Switch)
"When you register for the Holidailies portal you must select a username and a password. They become your credentials to post to the portal. We normally have a few cases of forgotten logins on opening day. This year, however, we had a significant number of people—nearly 5% of the registrants—reporting login problems.
Developers tend to blame the stupid users when problems occur. But when it's 5% of the users reporting problems you can't even try to trot out that lame excuse. Typically, these problems arise due to flaws in the user interface (UI). I believe that's exactly what happened in Holidailies. The registration difficulties probably resulted from two bad UI decisions that I made.
This year, we used nearly the same registration process as last year. The only thing we changed was the way that we assigned usernames. Last year, when you registered for the portal you had to choose a username and enter it into an empty form field. This year we provided a default username value. When you entered your contact email address into the form it also was copied (by the magic of javascript) into the username field. That provided a default value that you could choose to keep or change. A significant number of people (114 out of 165) chose to keep the default." continued ... (Via Chromium Switch)
Holidailies Website.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home