At work, whenever we need to log into a website, it displays a custom login screen. The text box labelled “Sign in” has the following text
“Enter user name as instructed below in GREY Box”
At the bottom, there is a grey box:
“Enter the password associated with your username”
The text box actually wants your email address but tells you to enter your username but to read the grey box. The grey box tells you to enter your password.
Absolute shambles of an implementation.
Troy Hunt, the cyber security expert, has a great blog on website certificates (DV/EV) which is worth a read:
https://www.troyhunt.com/how-everything-were-told-about-website-identity-assurance-is-wrong/
The TLDR is as follows:
He discusses false advertising in regards to extended validation (EV) certificates. Websites which had it used to show the green URL bar, but now browsers don’t do this.
Now you are supposed to click the padlock icon and inspect the details, but different browsers show different things.
If it shows the name of the company that issued the certificate, how do you know you should trust them?
“EV only works if people change their behaviour in its absence and clearly, that just doesn’t happen”
Troy Hunt
People now use mobile devices to browse the internet, and the security information is even more hidden in the browser. On iOS, you have to download a separate app!
Even “website checkers” are misleading.
A site seal is just an image, and therefore can be spoofed. Troy has registered digicert-secured.com to troll DigiCert and is still up a year later. It has a nice picture of a seal (animal).
The disadvantages of working at home is that I don’t socialise or exercise as much as I used to. So I thought I’d rejoin a local sports team. These days, you are supposed to buy your own kit, so I had to purchase from the supplier https://stag-sports.com/
After selecting what I wanted to buy, I read the following on the confirmation page:
Please review your choices below before finalizing your purchase. Please note that we only accept payments through PayPal, where you can make payments via your own PayPal account, or accepted Debit/Credit cards.
I thought this was saying they accept PayPal only. To use PayPal, you have to have a linked card, so the bit at the end just seemed to be saying that.
You then have to fill in your address and agree to their terms. You’d expect the terms just to be privacy and/or returns policy, but it takes you to their page on hoodies!
After clicking the Submit Payment button, when you haven’t specified any payment details at all, it takes you to a page which says:
Thank you for choosing to pay £54.95 to Stag Sports by card, please add your card details below and click ‘submit payment’ to complete your order.
Which suprised me because A) I thought they only accepted PayPal, and B) I never specified how I wanted to pay.
The form was for filling in a credit card, but then there was a PayPal logo image lower down; which then launched the usual PayPal pages.
If I was purchasing a product and had the choice of using a competitor, each of these aspects would just encourage me to look elsewhere. For me to complete my purchase from an unknown seller, they have to raise my trust by having a good user experience, have the correct information I wanted to find, and have no mistakes or bugs. The website is what really drives sales, so it’s important to get right.
When I used to go to work, it involved a 20 minute walk each direction, and I went there 5 days a week. After we started working at home, I’d probably get 30 mins walk a week on average, and I hadn’t actually tried running in 2 years.
In my first session back, I fell over a few times. Second session – I somehow manage to pull a muscle in both my thighs simultaneously. Third session – my legs generally ached and I felt a small tweak in my right thigh. Fourth – I got knocked to the ground and had scratches up my right leg from the astro-turf. Fifth, I ended up hurting my left knee on the way there!
I think what I am concluding is – that exercise is actually bad for you, and I am probably old now.
When you visit a website and have to consent to cookies, the user experience is often confusing. The wording, or the appearance of controls look like they are designed to mislead.
Sometimes when you see options and they look disabled by default, I wonder if I am misunderstanding what the dialog represents. So even when you close the dialog, have you really consented?
Additionally, how do I really know that my options have been saved and used correctly? Unless I see an advert for something I looked at on a particular website, I am oblivious to what a website stored about me, or sent on to their many partners.
Someone has made a short “game” which illustrates how bad these consent dialogs are.
I do love a stupid clickbait title. I’m sure Microsoft wants everyone to know these.
I always use a mouse and avoid using the touchpad. So I’ve only just discovered a bunch of touchpad shortcuts in Windows 10. Check these out:
To convey information in a small image can be a difficult task, but ideally should be recognisable at a glance. I thought it would be hard to screw up a 5 star rating system, but checkout this proposal:
https://rateyourmusic.com/board_message?message_id=7419371
In the first proposal, I try and count the coloured areas to work out what star rating it is, and it stresses me out. The more I look at it, the worse it gets.
The revised, second proposal is easier to (roughly) tell what it is at a glance, yet the 2.5-3.5 ratings are still difficult. It’s still hard to count because each piece isn’t even, yet it represents equal value. Each piece represents a 0.5 rating, so two coloured pieces equals 1 star, but the second piece to be coloured is smaller. Furthermore, the fully coloured image is a single star, yet represents 5. Terrible.
Their current design which they want to replace looks like this:
It is very easy to understand this at a glance. It looks clean and conveys the information. Maybe they could get rid of the solid circle and put the number there instead.
There is always the tried and tested classic, retro design.
Stranger Coding Tings 