Design Pattern 5: Can u rd this?

Michael Dain, Thursday, April 10, 2008 @ 9:29 am

Over the past several years, the web has been innudated with blurry, hard to read text. Users are forced to squint, struggle and enter this text exactly in order to proceed with their goal. I'm refferring to a method called a captcha, an image that normally contains letters that are intentionally obscured so that computer programs cannot 'read' them. While the need for this is understood, security against malicious scripts, the burden it puts on the user has only increased since these letters are usually not a 'word' and bent 'm's and 'l's easily become unreadable. All of this is to tell the system you are actually a human being, hardly something humans feel necessary to prove.

The amazing thing in the research realm of computer vision is that some algorithms are becoming able to 'read' this obscure text, making it necessary to make them even more unreadable. Recently, I have found this alternate 'maptcha' - being used on a number of sites, replacing the text with a simple addition problem. Not only was it less burdensome on the eyes, it seemed a bit fun to do a small math or counting exercise. I am curious if this is terribly insecure, or just a small revolt against the difficulty many users have with the other method. Either way, a great pattern to emulate, and much easier to use.

user experience design

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   ughh… captchas!! I wonder if someone has sued myspace yet for the wasted time and impoverished eye sight resulting from one too many “retype what you see here” … When I was at Forrester I did a report evaluating the usability of the sign up process at the top five social networking sites.. captchas really hurt them.

   Comment by Ross Popoff-Walker, Wednesday, June 25, 2008 @ 12:40 am

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