Captcha is a poor experience!
I think that most people have, at one point, come across CAPTCHA (or similar), that small box that contains a distorted word that you have to type correctly.
This is done to prevent bots, or automated software from logging into sites, or filling in forms, etc.
What really bugs me about this approach (from a User Experience point of view) is “Why do I have to prove that I am human?! It’s putting the onus on me, as a visitor. The system should be putting the demand for proof on the bots!
Others feel the same
Here are two excellent articles that cover exactly what I am referring to:
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Time to Kill Off Captchas (Scientific American)
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Beyond CAPTCHA: No Bots Allowed!
The Scientific American article discusses how, whenever there’s a problem in the modern world, we counter it by building barriers. Barriers that provide more inconvenience to genuine users, than for the “bad guys”.
“Beyond CAPTCHA: No Bots Allowed!” goes into the problems that are encountered with CAPTCHA. How the distorted text is so hard to read, etc. It carries on describing alternatives that can be put in place. It was, however, in its conclusion that the author showed that he understood my pain, with this sentence:
Don’t make users take responsibility for our (site owners) problems.
This was followed up with the succinct:
Bots, and the damage they cause, are not the fault or responsibility of individual users, and it’s totally unfair to expect them to take the responsibility. They’re not the fault of site owners either, but like it or not they are our responsibility — it’s we who suffer from them, we who benefit from their eradication, and therefore we who should shoulder the burden. And using interactive authentication systems such as CAPTCHA effectively passes the buck from us to our users.
Kapow!! There it is…don’t make the problem with bots, the responsibility of the users!
I agree totally! Do you?
(What are your thoughts on CAPTCHA?)
Want to learn more?
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Agreed. I dislike these things, they are, often, hard to see and it is unclear, at times, if they need punctuation. It is just bad design.
Difficult to use- yes, but also an inconvenience for the user.
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Well put! I sure hope Google doesn’t force you to have the messy Google + account and be *logged in* just to be able to drive their driver less cars when they are launched leaving you’re house to go to work or shopping or whatever.
Google has boosted it’s own numbers up by strong arm tactics such as forcing you to have a Google + IN ADDITION to you’re G-mail account to make their numbers look artificially high which their blind fanboys point saying “Everybody loves it so should you!”
Most of the time the captcha doesn’t even work no matter how many times I refresh the image especially if the blog is older.
By default when I search for blogs I seem to get old stuff from 2010 or earlier and nothing new which makes me wonder if people don’t blog anymore or if it’s the way I am searching perhaps?
Until Google changed their algorithms I never had such a problem until recent years.
Google seems to be a company that only cares about advertisers rather then users and their fanbase is so blind to it they could be herded to a cliff by Google’s cattle drivers and these fanboys would go right along.