Archive: September 18th, 2009

It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form. Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic.

I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. Thinking about it, getting a correct email address is more important. If a password is entered incorrectly, it can always be reset as long as the site can send a reset link to a valid email address. But if an email address is entered incorrectly, the site has no way of helping a user in difficulty.

Here’s an interesting scripted approach to avoiding duplicate email fields:

The last thing you see before you submit is your own email address.

Sign-up is something that user should only ever experience once on a site. But the log-in process can be one of the most familiar actions that a user performs. A common convention for log-in forms is a “remember me” checkbox. I have one of those on the Huffduffer log-in page, labelled with “remember me on this Turing machine” (hey, I thought it was cute).

Here’s a question from 37 Signals:

Has the time come to kill the “Remember me” check box and just assume that people using shared computers will simply logout?

There are a lot of arguments, both for and against, in the comments. It prompted me to think about this use case on Huffduffer and I’ve decided to keep the checkbox but I’ve now made it checked by default. I think that while there are very good reasons why somebody wouldn’t want a permanent cookie set on the machine they’re using (many of the use cases are mentioned in the comments to that 37 Signals post), the majority of people find it convenient.

It always pays to think about default states in UI. Good defaults are important:

Defaults are arguably the most important design decisions you’ll ever make as a software developer. Choose good defaults, and users will sing the praises of your software and how easy it is to use. Choose poor defaults, and you’ll face down user angst over configuration, and probably a host of tech support calls as well.