The CAPTCHAs (those pictures of distorted text that you sometimes have to enter to confirm that you’re human) used on the account registration for Firefox Add-Ons page are human-proof:
← wtf!The letterforms are ambiguous, the font is a distressed/grunge face that leaves orphaned blobs that might be part of letters, might be periods, and might just be random blobs. You can switch to an audio CAPTCHA, which is someone reading numbers that you type in instead of the picture of text. Great. Except that the weird background noise they put in to prevent automated speech recognition mangles the speech into unintelligibility.
After about four failed attempts with the audio and over twenty with the image, I give up.
To add insult to injury, the only reason I was creating an account in the first place is because I wanted to install an "experimental" add-on for Firefox, and you have to be registered to do that:
- Why do I have to login to install an experimental add-on?
- The add-on site requires that users login to install experimental add-ons as a reminder that you are about to undertake a risk step. [source]
1) Bullshit. You can give me a reminder without me being logged in if you want to. Really, I swear it’s true!
2) By a) making me register for no good reason and b) making the registration process difficult or impossible to complete, everybody loses:
I lose, because I can’t install the useful-looking software I wanted.
The plugin developer loses because I could be providing bug reports and feedback for the in-progress software, if I were able to install it.
The Mozilla Foundation loses because even though their "reason" for making me register is bogus and seems like an attempt to inflate their user numbers, I was willing to do it anyway. They lose a conversion, which they’re probably pretty desperate for given just how lame their justification is.
Conclusion: there’s no reason I should be frustrated at having my time wasted with a broken system (that I shouldn’t really have had to deal with in the first place), without the software, instead of using it—to everyone’s benefit.
Lessons from this experience:
- Test your application. If the goal is to make something understandable by humans and not by machines, make sure it’s understandable by humans.
- Don’t make people jump through unnecessary hoops, like registering for no good reason.
- If you’re going to anyway, make the hoop-jumping process as quick & painless as possible. For example, if you’re going to make someone register, collect the bare minimum of information that you need (not want). If you don’t piss them off, you’ll probably have other chances to get this info; if you do, you won’t get anything.
Comment (1)
Nick
Yesterday, during some god-awful mtg, I had this idea for a site called “Interfeces”, in order to poke fun at crappy interfaces. I kid you not. Just looked up the domain and found your site. Thanks, it was exactly what I had in mind… very good.
Drew