{"id":1239,"date":"2009-08-02T07:06:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-02T07:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.agconsult.com\/en\/passwords-to-hide-or-not-to-hide\/"},"modified":"2009-08-02T07:06:15","modified_gmt":"2009-08-02T07:06:15","slug":"passwords-to-hide-or-not-to-hide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.agconsult.com\/en\/usability-blog\/passwords-to-hide-or-not-to-hide\/","title":{"rendered":"Passwords: to hide or not to hide?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-jakob-nielsen-don-t-hide-passwords\">Jakob Nielsen: don&#8217;t hide passwords<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A while back Jakob Nielsen wrote an article in favour of no longer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/passwords.html\">hiding passwords behind a row of bullets<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His main arguments:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Users often make mistakes when typing passwords because they alternate between uppercase and lowercase, letters and numbers.<\/li><li>The lack of visual feedback increases the chance&nbsp;of mistakes. Users can&#8217;t see whether they&#8217;ve typed in something wrong.<\/li><li>Hidden passwords aren&#8217;t really safer. People can still look which keys&nbsp;the user is&nbsp;hitting to find out the password.<\/li><li>95% of the time, the user is alone behind the computer and nobody&#8217;s watching.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His conclusion: the small amount of added security does not outweigh the loss of visitors who have trouble registering and logging in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nielsen advises to use a check-box to give the user the option to hide the password behind a row of bullets. On security-sensitive websites, like for example banks, he advises to&nbsp;check the box by default. <!--break--><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-what-do-i-think\">What do I think?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nielsen is no dummy.&nbsp;He&#8217;s absolutely right when he says the bullets cause confusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People aren&#8217;t sure whether or not they&#8217;ve made a mistake, they don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;ve typed in already so they just start all over again. Sighing deeply. That&#8217;s what we often see during <a href=\"\/en\/usability-conversion-optimization\/user-testing\">user testing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nielsen&#8217;s&nbsp;argument that the bullets don&#8217;t really make it more secure&nbsp;is also largely true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But there&#8217;s also something like perceived security. I remember 2&nbsp;days of user testing on designs where the password hadn&#8217;t&nbsp;yet been masked by a row&nbsp;of bullets and was on the screen for everyone to see.&nbsp;8 out of the 10 users spontaneously made negative remarks about this. Things like &#8216;Whoa, that&#8217;s not normal, right?&#8217; and &#8216;That&#8217;s not really safe now, is it?&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which is why I&#8217;m not a fan of just showing the password on the screen without masking it. People don&#8217;t like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-what-does-apple-do\">What does Apple do?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you type in a password in&nbsp;the iPhone the last character you typed in is briefly shown.&nbsp;That way you get visual feedback without showing the entire password on the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Can we do this on the&nbsp;web? Apparently we can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chris Coyier&nbsp;developed <a href=\"http:\/\/css-tricks.com\/examples\/iPhonePassword\/\">2 versions of the&nbsp;iPhone-system for the web<\/a>. For the techies out there:&nbsp;based on&nbsp;jQuery &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/css-tricks.com\/better-password-inputs-iphone-style\/\">more on the&nbsp;script and the possiility to download the files<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-where-do-we-go-from-here\">Where do we go from here?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My gut feeling says we should go for Coyier&#8217;s 2nd iPhone version, although the script apparently needs some improvements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But what&#8217;s my gut feeling really worth? Not a lot. To be sure what works best we need to take various options and test them with real people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Classic bullet system.<\/li><li>iPhone-version.<\/li><li>Nielsen&#8217;s way: a check-box to mask the password (once checked by default and once unchecked by default).&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.viget.com\/advance\/password-fields-are-annoying\/\">Some examples of this approach.<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In usability, opinions are nothing. <a href=\"\/en\/usability-conversion-optimization\/user-testing\">Testing<\/a> is everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hiding passwords behind a row of bullets causes more problems than it&#8217;s worth, according to Jakob Nielsen. His advice: show the password on the screen by default.<br \/>\n<span class=\"note-blauw\">Is that really the best solution?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usability"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.5 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Passwords: to hide or not to hide? | AGConsult<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hiding passwords behind a row of bullets causes more problems than it&#039;s worth, according to Jakob Nielsen. His advice: show the password by default and give users the option to hide it. Is that the best solution?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.agconsult.com\/en\/usability-blog\/passwords-to-hide-or-not-to-hide\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Passwords: to hide or not to hide?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hiding passwords behind a row of bullets causes more problems than it&#039;s worth, according to Jakob Nielsen. His advice: show the password by default and give users the option to hide it. 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