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I am very pro usability—anyone who knows me will agree. I fight the fights that need to be fought. I go against the corporate decisions that don’t benefit the user. I evangelize for Donald Norman and hang on  every word that Jakob Nielsen speaks. This is why it seems so very strange that I would be incited by an innocuously titled article, Stop Password Masking, on useit.com.

Dr. Nielsen contends that we—Web developers—should abandon legacy design and stop providing “little dots” instead of the actual characters that a person is typing in for their password. On the surface, this seems to make sense. After all, it’s hard to type in that which you can not see.

I guess I should be upfront and say this is many years as a sys-admin speaking–not a usability expert—but none-the-less I found many things flawed with the post. I would add that the designers of systems have a responsibility to protect users from compromising their account.

But the main point of the article is that by not showing users what they are typing when the type a password, we are decreasing the usability of the page and also the security of the page.

Here is a brief recap of the main points of the article (please read the whole article for yourself):

1. There are very few times when a user is in actual danger of someone “seeing” what they are typing
2. Users make more errors when they can’t see what they are typing
3. More errors means less confidence
4. All this leads to users using simple passwords or copy/pasting passwords

One of his primary points is that a “skilled criminal” can capture you password by looking at the keyboard, not the screen. It’s hard for me to argue with this as I have witnessed this and even done it.

Here’s the rub…I have managed users on systems large and small for the better part of 20 years. I have learned by observation that people don’t have simple passwords because passwords are hard to type in without seeing, they have simple passwords because they are easy to remember.

As a system administrator I know, inherently, that the weakest chain in any system is the user. And it’s not because it’s hard for them to type their password, it’s because they want one password that is easy to remember and is somehow tied in with who they are as an individual.

For this reason, I find passphrases to be a better solution because they are easy to remember and are instantly harder to hack due to their length. If someone has a hint of what you like, they may more easily crack the passphrase with shoulder surfing, but it’s much harder than a simple password.

Lastly, Dr.  Nielsen points out that we should abandon legacy design—I am a HUGE fan of abandoning legacy design when it makes sense. Dr. Nielsen points to both form reset buttons and password masking as being legacy design…as the twitteratie say, EPIC FAIL!

Let’s focus on usability, but only when usability is really the problem. But maybe you disagree with me, leave me a comment.

I must say up front that I don’t want to make a judgement on the new facebook homepage layout. I could, but I won’t. What is infinitely more interesting to me is everyone else’s opinion (hopefully that makes me a better usability designer!).

It is fascinating to me that there is such an uproar over the new facebook design. Some of the comments I hear–”it’s too cluttered”, “it’s to confusing”, “there is too much going on”–to be honest, are complaints I have always had.

Even more confusing, are comments such as: “I can’t see what people are doing any more”, “I don’t know anyone’s status updates unless I look at their pages”. It took me a long time to understand these last set of comments and I believe that it is people that have bookmarked their profile page as their homepage and are only seeing their own posts and not their friends.

So what does all this mean? Will facebook fail? Should/could this have been avoided?

I personally see a natural evolution in a widely used Web site that is responding to pressure from competition (e.g. Twitter). I don’t think this will be the downfall of facebook. But I do think this could have been avoided. How? Better promotion of the changes, a longer transition cycle, an initial opt-in period where they could have solicited feedback.

The key take-away is that they can listen to their community, even if it is a small minority of whom are complaining, and see if they can either meet them part way, or help educate them to the benefits of the change.

That’s what I think, what do you think?

After releasing the second version of Kindle hardware, Amazon had also release a software version of the Kindle reader for Apple’s iPhone. As cool as the Kindle is—and I have had the opportunity to use one, they are very cool—the $349 price has kept me from getting one.

Now, Amazon is making it clear that they are interested in selling books not hardware. Kindle for iPhone is a free download from the iTunes music store and is capable of reading any of the books available to the Kindle. The app works well, and the reading experience is comparable to other eBook readers available for the phone.

When reading a book or article, the user has control over choosing the font size (from 5 different sizes), bookmarking a page, and jumping to marked sections of the book. You navigate from page to page by swiping right-to-left (or left-to-right if you are going backwards) which I must admit felt like a natural gesture at first, but quickly grew tiresome as even a slow reader like me is constantly flipping pages due to the small screen size.

Books are added very easily via a Web browser. You simply navigate to Amazon, purchase the books you wish, and the next time you start Kindle for iPhone, your recent purchases are downloaded. My first book was Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. It downloaded in less than 5 seconds on WiFi. I also tried syncing over edge and that worked as well–with Treasure Island downloading in less than 20 seconds. In addition, Kindle for iPhone has Whispersync, which means, anywhere you leave off in you reading is automatically bookmarked and synced to any Kindle device. So, the claim is that moving between your iPhone and Kindle 2 will be seamless.

You can download books by ordering them on your iPhone, but the process is not a smooth experience. You click a Get Books link which takes you to a page describing how to get new books, but then links you off to Safari for you to purchase the books. You must then go back into Kindle for iPhone to download and read the new books.

Currently, my favorite eBook reader for the iPhone is Stanza. It is very similar to Kindle for iPhone, but I feel it does a couple things better. First, it allows you to move page to page by simply pressing once on the right or left side of the screen. Second, it allows you to download tens of thousands of free books directly from Project Gutenberg very quickly and easily. Third, and this is mostly superfluous, Stanza adjusts it’s screen when you turn the phone sideways. In reader mode it will give you a wider column. In title browsing mode, you see your library using Cover Flow.

But, the really great thing about the Kindle for iPhone software is that all these books I purchase will just work if I do buy a Kindle. All these books will automatically be available on my newly purchased Kindle. Also, the selection of books is very competitive in price and fairly substantial.

If you are interested in trying out the software, here is a list of free and low cost books I found that sounded interesting.
Free:

• The World’s Greatest Books Volume 01 Fiction
• The World’s Greatest Books Volume 02 Fiction
• The Three Musketeers
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• South: the story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 expedition
• The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Frankenstein

Less than $1.00:

• The Man Shakespeare (And His Tragic Life Story)
• The Memoirs of Victor Hugo
• The Prince (Machiavelli)
• Remarks of President Obama at the Signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

What are your thoughts? Leave me a comment….

Skittles unveiled their new corporate site to much applause and some disdain by the Twitter community. Taking a cue perhaps, from agency.com, they have reduced their site to be nothing but a navigational overlay box on top of content provided by social network sites.

screen grab: skittles.com homepage on March 2, 2009

This works by making their:

• home page a Twitter search feed
• product pages, Wikipedia pages
• media pages both Flickr and YouTube feeds
• friends page a FaceBook page

Simple is best right? Maybe not.

So what is the upside for Sktittles? Well today, at least, they have generated plenty of free publicity. Going forward, they will have a lot of fresh content and perhaps some ongoing publicity.

But how about the downside? There are plenty of thoughts that pop into my head.

Perception

How will they be perceived by the social networking community or the social network sites themselves? Within several hours of launching their Flickr page was account “missing” and a “neutrality” warning was posted at the top of their Wikipedia article.

screen grab: the article notice that appears at the top of Wikipedia's Skittles page.

Skittles is “borrowing” a lot of bandwidth from these sites, for free, and what are they providing in return? Users of social network sites provide content, sometimes very interesting content, and that, along with increasing per-page impressions is the fee they pay for using a free service. What is Skittles giving back to the community?

“Social-ness”

The biggest part of being a part of “the social”, and the part that companies often don’t get, is that it’s about 2-way communication. Kudos (excuse the pun), to Skittles for allowing their customers to have an unfiltered voice, but where are they in the conversation? We want to hear Skittles interact with their customers, not just hear ourselves talk about them.

Alienation

What is the experience for many of Skittle’s potential customers? For instance, you now have to be 13 years old to view the site. And even if excluding kids from a candy store makes sense, what about the folks that are Web savvy, but not social network savvy. Perhaps this site will be a little weird to them. Which leads me to the biggest issue, usability.

Usability

Is the site usable? We all know that when considering usability, we must first consider our audience. Some would even go as far as saying that we can limit to a specific target audience, not just any possible site visitor. If we suppose what a target audience for Skittles might be, and even if that audience is entirely composed of social network aware individuals, would they find the site useable?

Well, next we would need to know the tasks the audience might engage in. Let’s also suppose it’s the following:

• find nutritional information – OK, it’s available via Wikipedia, but can I be sure it hasn’t been altered? I also need to do quite a bit of searching (e.g. reading and scrolling) to find it.
• find contact information – perhaps the easiest thing to do on the site and bonus points for not hiding the phone number
• search for information – not available at all. This is a complete failure for many web users who wish to visit a site and immediately search for the piece of information that they need.

So, in 3 tasks that I picked, the site only covers one well. But in addition, I see some other major usability hurdles:

• Poor feedback as to where you are in the site. While this is important in any site, it is very important in a site such as this where the context of the page you navigate to may differ greatly from where you came. e.g. will the user know that WikiPedia is the product page?
• Navigational overlay gets in the way. On many pages the navigation box seems to be on top of the content and it’s not readily apparent how you shrink it.
• Random pop-up explaining how to “drop the box in the corner”. If you have to explain to your audience how to use your site, or worse, how to navigate away from it, you have failed at usability.

screen grab: skittles.com pop-up explaining how to navigate away from their site.

Lastly, while not a usability issue, it is odd that a promotional site would ask you to accept their terms and conditions before they tell you about their product. Given the nature of the content that may appear, I certainly understand the reason, but it seems like a big hoop for someone to jump through just to view your site.

To sum it up, I would say the new Skittles.com makes a great meme and a is perhaps a bit of Internet history, but to me, the site doesn’t make sense. While I think that companies should be involved in social networking, it’s very important how they approach it.

I can’t wait to see what my colleagues at BrandLogic think about the impact this site has on the Skittles brand. And I would love to hear what you think. Please leave me your comments.

One of my favorite podcasts, Skepticality, is back after a brief hiatus. It's a great show that discusses critical thinking, debunks common myths, and has some great guest hosts. They are now the official podcast of Skeptic magazine.

At first I was—excuse the pun—skeptical, and asssumed that the podcast would be bitter people not wanting to believe in anything, but as the show taught me a skeptic's goal is to disprove or prove an unverified fact. So for instance, a true skeptic would be/should be equally happy to prove a paranormal experience as to debunk it.

It's a great show, with people that believe in applying critical and applaud analytical thinking. Give it a try!