<rant><\/p>\n
The web has been around now for over two decades. Whether it was a practice\u00a0used during\u00a0the internet’s\u00a0early “wild-west” period, or something not well thought out, it is time for these\u00a0practices stop. \u00a0Here is my list of practices to avoid and even openly condemn.<\/p>\n
Re-type your email address<\/em><\/p>\n Re-entering an email address was a very simple\u00a0way of validating an email address entered by a user, way back when even an email address was new to the user like the internet itself. Email addresses are common place now, so having a user re-enter them isn’t necessary. We still have our users enter and re-enter passwords, but think about why: we don’t display the passwords\u00a0to the user when we do this. And the modern practice with passwords is to add a check box next to the password, to optionally display it.\u00a0And the sites which are well-designed have\u00a0dropped the second password entry text box when the check box to expose the password is selected. \u00a0So how can we justify repetition for an\u00a0email address which is fully displayed?<\/p>\n Disabling copy\/paste when asking for an email address or password<\/em><\/p>\n This one is so asinine it’s hard to fathom (are you listening United Healthcare). \u00a0A person goes to a place where the accurate<\/strong> email address is written down<\/span>, copies it, then is denied pasting a known correct address into the text, and requires an error-prone manual keyboard entry instead. \u00a0For those of you doing this, lay off the drugs. \u00a0For those of you being told to do this by a product\u00a0manager, hide their drugs.<\/p>\n Fighting password saving mechanisms built into a browser<\/em><\/p>\n Modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome have become very good at detecting\u00a0login pages and allowing the user to save their login information for future auto-population when they next visit the site. \u00a0Still, it is common to see web applications using Flash,\u00a0Silverlight or other HTML 5 code to circumvent this. \u00a0Why? \u00a0It has to be\u00a0some level of paranoid control-freak in the product manager\u00a0who thinks this way. \u00a0Anyone with any level of internet savvy wants to save credentials. \u00a0And the larger players in the browser market like Google have more resources and more motivation to secure the information than any localized IT department. \u00a0A product manager may feel like their\u00a0job is secure telling their\u00a0manager how they protect their product by blocking saved passwords, but the world is really getting fed up with simple auto updates erasing saved credentials in mobile devices. \u00a0That should be your cue. \u00a0Even worse, the\u00a0app is forcing people to do more work, when the goal of technology is to save them work and leverage their time.<\/p>\n <\/rant><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <rant> The web has been around now for over two decades. Whether it was a practice\u00a0used during\u00a0the internet’s\u00a0early “wild-west” period, or something not well thought out, it is time for these\u00a0practices stop. \u00a0Here is my list of practices to avoid and even openly condemn. Re-type your email address Re-entering an email address was a very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-on-my-mind","category-technologythoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1850"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1984,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions\/1984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}