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).