NY Times Dictionary
Whilst reading an article on the NY Times I came across their somewhat hidden dictionary feature. I’d double-clicked on a term I didn’t recognise, intending to do a right-click Google search, when a window popped up. I’d almost dismissed it before I realised it was a ‘feature’.
Apparantly, this has caused some annoyance among those who idly click their mouse as they read, or highlight words as they go, even so far as the creation of counter-scripts and ad-blocking techniques. Plus I bet it confuses the heck out of new-to-the-web people for whom the NYTimes may be the first port-of-call. Whilst I do think it’s a neat feature, love the discoverability of it, and may be great for assisting understanding, perhaps there should be a toggle somewhere in the member centre (I had a look and could see one)?
Posted: Thu 28 Jun 2007 ~ filed under General Web ;Usability ;
Password complexity
It’s that time of year again and I’m on the hunt for a good car insurance deal. Not wanting to repeatedly add my details into a dozen or so sites I thought I’d make use of one of the many comparison sites to do the leg-work for me. All good so far, until I had to create a password to go with my personal information. Now most sites stipulate a pasword between say 6 and 12 characters, sometimes requiring letters and numbers if they’re being concious about security. Not so insuresupermarket.com. No, they require exactly 8 characters, letters and numbers, and no characters to recurr more than twice. I have to say I was hard-pressed to come up with a password that I’d remember which matched these tight requirements. This coming at the end of a long form-filling exercise is not the best way to garner repeat customers.
Ironically I now can’t find anywhere on their site to retrieve a saved quote.
Not only that but their form validation only validates one field at a time, meaning that if you miss a couple of required fields you can end up having to resubmit the same form several times.
Thank goodness this is a once-per-year event.
Posted: Tue 14 Nov 2006 ~ filed under Usability ;