Nielsen argues that usability suffers when passwords are just a series of bullets and that it causes sites to lose business due to customers struggling to log in.

When you make it hard for users to enter passwords you create two problems — one of which actually lowers security:

Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing while filling in a form. They therefore feel less confident. This double degradation of the user experience means that people are more likely to give up and never log in to your site at all, leading to lost business. (Or, in the case of intranets, increased support calls.)

The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.

Personally I’m quite happy with the idea that passwords are visible in plain text although I agree with the requirement to have a checkbox for when I’m in public place. The big issue for me is that a large proportion of web users don’t really understand things and are likely to assume that passwords visible in plain text are somehow less secure than passwords that are converted to bullets.

There are huge numbers of people who don’t understand Internet, ranging from the dozens of people every month who search for www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc and then email me thinking I’m the DVLA to the people who complain to our clients that their ecommerce forms are publicly displaying their credit card number when it’s just their browser auto-complete function.

What do you think?

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Should Passwords Be Masked in Online Forms?

They say they are looking at Confused.com and yet the tester was actually looking at confuse.com with is nothing more than a spam site to catch people who typed the wrong url. Then they look at http://www.compare-and-go.co.uk thinking it is part of GoCompare.com when it’s just an affiliate site which makes money by sending traffic to GoCompare.com – the site even says “We are not part of GoCompare.com” on the homepage.

The BBC has helpfully added a message to say “The following website confuse.com has no connection with Confused.com” so why on earth are they posting a video of it? Basically they have found a useless spam site and come to the conclusion it isn’t easy for visually impaired people to use it.

If I was GoCompare or Confused.com I would be pretty upset about this.

Words fail me.

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BBC Publishes Something Really Stupid

Right now, there are more than 1.2 billion Internet users around the world, most of which speak a language other than English and most live outside of the United States. In a multilingual world, the odds are that Web users will get lost in the online space as it can be hard to control how people arrive at a Web site and ensure that, once they’ve arrived, they easily find where they need to go.

This research illustrates how companies are using geolocation to greatly improve the user experience across languages and borders – resulting in increased click-throughs and conversions – with the consumer being totally oblivious that, their online experience is being personalised for them. For example, if you have an ecommerce site, you could present prices in Euros instead of dollars without the user having to go through the pull-down menu process.

More than 12% of large multinational companies are currently using geolocation to improve global navigation, which is a 200% increase over a year before. Geolocation is rapidly becoming a mainstream application for companies across all major industries. Below is a selected list of identified companies that use geolocation to improve global navigation:

• Adidas
• Amazon
• Bose
• Google
• Hertz
• Hotels.com
• InterContinental Hotels
• NIVEA
• PayPal
• Samsung
• Skype
• Yahoo!

To reach 90% of the world’s 1.2 billion Internet users, companies must support 20 or more languages, and an increasing number of companies are doing just that. Some statistics show that when local language is not presented, the drop-off rate can be as high as 50-70% of visitors. One company, a large US software outfit, reported recently that 70% of the visitors to its .com site were international. Unfortunately, this company also noticed that many of these international Web users were not able to find the country sites that had been developed for them. They were getting lost, resulting not only in missed opportunities – but lost revenues.

Geolocation combats this dilemma by acting as a form of global “air traffic control,” ensuring that everyone gets where they need to go and can see the content most relevant to them. The foundation for geolocation is the Internet protocol (IP) address – a numeric string assigned to every device attached to the Internet. When an individual surfs the Web, their computer sends out this IP address to every Web site visited. Geolocation service providers build massive databases that link each IP address to a specific location, and due to its fluidity, many providers update their databases on a daily or weekly basis, sometimes reporting a 5-10% change in IP addresses locations each week.

Geolocation can provide much more than a geographic location. Many providers supply up to 30 data fields for each IP address that can help to further determine if users really are where they say they are. These may include:

• Country, region, state, city, ZIP code, area code
• Latitude/longitude
• Time zone

Equipped with this information, you may respond to the Web user with a wide range of localised content.

Other popular ways that companies are currently using geolocation include: localising products and services, local search and geo-targeted advertising, enhanced web analytics, preventing card-not-present and identity theft fraud and enforcing digital content and territory rights.

Further reading

Quova research paper
Guide to geotargeting for SEO

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Geolocation – Improving Navigation for Web Users Worldwide

This week Postcode Anywhere are launching an innovative new web service to help developers build applications – read below for details about the service.

TheWebService takes all the pain out of website and software development – in fact, it’s now practically effortless to develop software for such diverse applications as business contact management, route planning, geo-coding and international address data management… and these are just a few we’ve thought of.

We’ve cast aside the need for time-consuming coding in umpteen different languages – with the click of a button we’ll write most of it for you, from JavaScript to PHP to Oracle and everything else in between.

Our route-optimisation software is something we particularly like – we have one client who estimates they could save over £900,000 per year from an initial investment of less than £200. That’s the kind of return most people only dream about at the bookies – and for the record, if you’d rather place a bet with those odds you’re just as likely to win as you are to seriously injure yourself with a chainsaw*. And although we make coding easier, we can’t help you if you don’t have any hands!

As well as allowing users to manage public data from people like Royal Mail and Dun & Bradstreet, we’ve given developers a hand making custom software and web services for managing private data like employee records and stock control info.

To this end we’ve created “MyTables” – a plug-and-play technology that means you can access your personal data anywhere without having to install any programs on your machine. We’ve dubbed MyTables “the Babel fish of data storage” – it’s easy to use across any number of platforms and beats more traditional (and pedestrian) methods of data storage like SQL and Access into a cocked hat. No downloads, no costly upgrades, a non-existent learning curve and a set-up time measured in minutes rather than weeks.

It’s mashup heaven – we certainly expect the ubiquitous Google Maps to feature prominently in many people’s use of our technology – and other APIs are just as easy to use. The paint on TheWebService platform is still wet and our catalogue of testimonials is in its infancy, but we’ve already integrated with leading Software as a Service (SaaS) providers Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Once the application or web service has been built, management and administration of the information is simple. Secure keys give different administration rights so you can rest assured that your data is safe.
TheWebService is backed by over eight years of business experience from the award-winning team behind Postcode Anywhere – which has already revolutionised the data markets.

*Source – http://www.funny2.com/odds.htm

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New Web Service from Postcode Anywhere

Another example of bad website design and a total failure to update systems for the biggest browser launch of the last few years.

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Actually Comcast, It’s time to upgrade YOUR website

As well as looking a lot better than the previous design the new theme offers increased flexibility for new features. We chose to use the fantastic Thesis Theme because it has a great codebase that you can build from and customise to your hearts content. WordPress as a CMS doesn’t offer users the ability to modify blog design very easily but Thesis fixes that and the latest version even lets you alter widths and colours from the control panel.

What’s New

The first thing you will notice is the logo, this was done by Alf Design over at 99designs.com (email alf.communications@gmail.com) and looks pretty awesome.

The search page is a major improvement, the standard WordPress search is awful for a multitude of reasons – the main one being the fact that results are ordered by date. Do you know any other decent search engine that orders things by date?

I spent some time reading Joost’s article on How to Improve WordPress Search and implemented the changes as well as a few extra tweaks. The results are a huge improvement with spelling corrections and related searches coming up perfectly. Click the screenshots below to test it out.

Spelling corrections, pulled from the Yahoo API.

Next up we have added a “Best Posts” category to the menu which will showcase the best content that’s been published on BlogStorm.

Another improvement is the footer which now includes thumbnail image links to all the categories.

The comments are a work in progress, Thesis separates trackbacks and comments by default which is great. Thesis doesn’t easily accommodate threaded comments and the previous threaded comments plugin we used relied on JavaScript and didn’t work on a number of browsers so I decided to remove it until we can come up with a better solution.

If you haven’t seen the site in a while I saved a screenshot of the previous design here.

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We’ve redesigned come and take a look

What’s more the designer of the theme is alleging that Number 10 (or the agency that built the site) has removed the footer attribution and is therefore in breach of copyright.

Of course there are two sides to every story and copyright of WordPress themes is a somewhat grey area so it’s interesting that the agency has taken time to respond to the issue on their blog.

Downing Street has issued a statement but judging by the number of blogs covering the story it isn’t going to die down that easily.

Our supplier is certain that there is no such issue concerning the new website. Again, thanks for feedback and please keep it coming.

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Did Gordon Brown really steal a WordPress theme?

The idea is that rather than everybody turning up at the party with gifts you didn’t want you can direct them to your online gift list where they upload money that you can redeem for vouchers at places such as Amazon & John Lewis.

The site is one of the few brand new sites we see that has a real chance of becoming a mainstream website. It has all the boxes ticked – concept, design and even viral marketing elements.

If you’re having a party and 50 guests each pay £5 into your birthday fund that gives you a £250 voucher rather than 50 small gifts you didn’t really want. Apparently kids who have used the service for their parties have walked away with hundreds of pounds already.

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Startup 1BigPresent Creates Gift Lists for your Party

Apparently this morning they sent a text message to everybody who had registered an interest. Thousands of customers then descended onto the site which promptly crashed.

Presumably O2 has lots of traffic and a robust e-commerce system in place already so how can they be unable to manage what is basically a database that stores peoples details?

The Register is less than sympathetic:

Customers were told by text message that new iPhones were available to existing customers who upgrade. But they were presented this morning with error messages on the O2 upgrade site after filling in forms and told to contact customer services by telephone.

“Which I did,” said Reg reader Carol Dew, “only to be advised that they couldn’t take telephone orders until Friday, and they were very sorry for the inconvenience, but they had 2000 other people just like me calling them this morning, and their managers had advised them that the site was overwhelmed. Because they didn’t anticipate the demand. But when I asked how many iPhones were in stock, since I was afraid they’d run out before I could order mine, I was told that they’d asked customers to ‘register their interest’ on the website (did that; hence getting the text this morning). And that every time someone registered their interest, they ordered in an iPhone for them. Yet they didn’t anticipate today’s demand.”

From The Telegraph:

An O2 spokeswoman said she did not know how many people had been able to pre-order before the upgrade website was suspended. She said they were working to restore the site as soon as possible and were “pretty confident” they would have enough handsets to cope with the demand.

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O2 Suffers Spectacular iPhone Store Failure

There doesn’t appear to be any new functionality but the design looks pretty good.

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BBC website gets a redesign