I have great respect for both Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Schneier and I usually agree with both of them. But in this case, I think they’re wrong.

Recently, Nielsen posted a case against password masking that made me raise my eyebrows and go “hmmm… I’m puzzled”. Then Schneier agreed.

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

It’s a bad idea to propose password unmasking. Here are my reasons why.

I don’t know if they both work alone in a private office, but I have always worked in an open office setting where many people have access to my screen. I am uncomfortable with the idea of people being able to look at my screen to discover my passwords. Same for demos and presentations, customer support/screensharing etc. Computer use is more social than Bruce and Jakob seem to assume.

This is a really great video.

I wasn’t surprised by this by a least bit, because all my academic training was about one simple mantra: “the user is not like me”. People care less than you think about technology, and are creative in a completely different way from what you think. This is a great thing for those who can figure it out and build on it.

Coincidentally, just this weekend I finished reading “The Inmates Are Running The Asylum”, Alan Cooper’s book that basically makes the business case for interaction design. Related to the above, it looks into how programmers and engineers, who he calls “homo logicus”, are different from “normal people”, and how should polite software behave.

I made myself a poster with the important bullets for the office wall. Download if you want. And to learn more about what these mean, buy the book.

Do you remember the Borat movie? And the fact that it had a bunch of bizarre clips in the end credits, that were actually genuine Estonian TV commercials for a Soviet era? See my old longer post here.

A selection of the clips is available on Youtube and you can buy all of them subtitled on a DVD from timeless.ee

A good piece on iPhone vs Palm Pre, discussing, among other things, hardware and software keyboards, and what are the merits of one over the other.

There’s an important aspect of the iPhone keyboard that I don’t see mentioned very often, and the following photo shows it.

It is very easy to enter non-standard characters with iPhone, and I use this capability a lot to send messages in my native language. It is easy for Apple to deploy new characters or entirely new layouts to the keyboard.

I dare anyone to show me it is as easy with the hardware keyboard. Even if it is possible to enter nonstandard characters in a similar way of holding a key, they will pop up in a place that is disconnected from the button press, so they will feel like second-class citizens and I will feel like a substandard person because of that. On the iPhone, the extended characters pop up very close to the original keypress and the experience of entering, say, “ä”, is not that different from entring “a”.

For Apple, the software keyboard means that they can reuse the same SKU (physical unit) for any location, and deploy all the needed changes in software configuration. This must be much cheaper than Palm etc having to manufacture different units for different places and not being able to reuse them. So I expect the iPhone to sell much better globally (as it already is selling) than Pre (which is just US and one carrier for now).

It’s sad that Microsoft keeps giving me bad experiences, despite having Bill Buxton and other wonderful people on their team. (Yeah, Buxton is in MS Research, not the “product”. Whatever. Still Microsoft.) My intent is not to bash them or anybody else just for the sake of bashing, but just now I came across something that made me again go just “sigh…” and shake my head.

So here’s the situation. I am trying to install Windows Media Player on my Mac. It’s not a bad piece of software at all for using Windows Media content on Mac. Yes, you can have Flip4Mac that integrates with Quicktime and is sometimes more convenient. Yet at other times, I’ve found Media Player gives me better experience, because it is Microsoft native so they have all the codecs and logic packaged up inside their own app and don’t need to interface with QuickTime.

Estonia is going to have two national e-votes this year. First for European Parliament, second for municipalities. I am going to vote over the Internet on both occasions.

The first e-vote is in about a month. Today, they published the application for public, so that people can test whether their computers, ID card readers and ID card readers work correctly. I tried it out, of course. See the screenshot walkthrough here. All worked well, apart from one strange warning when opening the disk image with the application. I hope they fix it.

Read also my longer rant about ID cards, e-voting and the associated topics. Sadly, many so-called “e-voting” around the world in other countries have been complete jokes or disasters, and have undermined the validity of the concept in the eyes of the public.

I continue to believe that correctly, securely implemented Internet-based voting (or derivatives thereof, such as mobile etc) is currently rare outside Estonia, but is going to happen sooner or later anyway, and Estonia serves as a model of this.

It’s great to have internal competition between your products. And Skype has it between SkypeToGo and the iPhone version for some functions. The question then becomes, which of the two do I use, while still giving money to Skype. I don’t need to look for external things.

I use SkypeToGo a lot for international calls. When Skype for iPhone came out, I was curious to see how it compares with SkypeToGo, with my hypothesis being that Skype for iPhone is slower. So I did an analysis using the Keystroke-Level Model. It’s one of the more “hard science” parts of Human-Computer Interaction methods. I won’t write the theory here, you can read more in Wikipedia or see the project page.

In short, there is a software called CogTool that neatly packages up the hard science. You give it the system interface, describe what keys the user presses, and it tells you how long the actions are going to take. There’s science behind why the numbers it reports are correct. Go read the papers if you want to learn more.

So, long story short, I compared SkypeToGo and Skype for iPhone for the task of calling a phone number that was in my contact/shortcut list. I had previously set up everything with all sorts of auto-logins. So I am answering the question, “starting from the iPhone home screen, how long is it going to take me to be connected to phone number X?”

These were my preliminary results.

In short, CogTool told me that the task takes 8 seconds with SkypeToGo, and 6.6 seconds with Skype for iPhone.

Today was a happy day for the Internet.

Skype for iPhone was released today.

When I first heard the rumors last week, I didn’t really believe them. But I was ready to be surprised in a positive way. And Skype followed through, with the download really being available Monday night in the US, ahead of the Tuesday launch.

I have many thoughts about the software itself, but I’ll let those bubble around a bit and do a post series, rather than try to vomit everything into a big post right away. But what I can say is this: Skype for iPhone is definitely more interesting than, say, Skype 4 for Windows. Not only because I will myself use it daily, but Skype is really breaking some new territory here and upping the ante in the open mobile platforms struggle.

When one app lists unrelated apps in its description, I can only conclude that it’s spam.

Just watched the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement event. Lots of good stuff. I’m looking forward to it becoming available.

The piece I found most interesting was about accessories. Namely, that you will be able to control any kind of hardware (assuming the hardware provider provides an iPhone app), either wirelessly via Bluetooth or through the Dock connector.

I sometimes stream stuff from my Apple TV through my actual TV, having the TV speakers off and listening to stuff by my wireless headphones, so I can walk around my place and still listen to a podcast or something. And I can control the playback with Apple Remote app from iPhone. It was initially weird to wrap my head around this concept, but it works totally great.

So now this accessories piece generalizes this functionality, letting iPhone become a central control device for everything in the living room and kitchen and other places in your home. I would welcome being able to control my cable box from iPhone instead of using the bad remote and ugly onscreen menus that they have.

I also found it interesting that they demonstrated an insulin reader device that plugs in to your iPhone. Traditionally consumer electronics has steered clear of medical and other critical applications, although consumer-class hardware is nevertheless used a lot in medicine (with most of it being Microsoft/Windows territory). This shift into actual health applications — not just reference encyclopedias or such, but actually interacting with your body — was an interesting move.

It was also interesting to watch the insulin reader demo because it’s a very clear example of persona- and scenario-driven design. They presented an actual persona profile and their daily scenario on the stage, which of course made me as interaction designer jump with joy because I could identify with that design method.