Stop Password Masking
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Jakob Nielsen implores web developers to stop masking passwords in web input forms. I have to admit I never thought about it this way.
Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.
The only case when you would need to mask passwords is when the user is in a public space, in which case Jakob proposes there be a check box to mask the password in the input form. (via Kottke)
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Insightful post by Adrian Holovaty about how the change in what is being delivered is more important than how it is delivered:
But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it’s not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it’s a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same “news article” bucket, you can’t easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can’t easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect
