When CAPTCHAs Block Users

I was creating a group with Google Groups for a weekly programming meeting I am a part of, and after filling out the first page, which asks for the group's name, email address, description and other settings, this CAPTCHA came up:


It appears the CAPTCHA's service was unavailable, and so the challenge image was unavailable (I typed the error's sentence just in case I could continue), so I, a real human, was unable to create the group, and had to postpone my attempt until some other time.
I wasted time in the previous page, writing the name of the group, email address, description; all content I had to come up with was to be wasted (though I saved it to a trusty text file).

So here's my suggestion: why not verify "humanness" first -- before the user has to even start thinking about group names and descriptions. Get the "verification" out of the way first so that this doesn't happen to anyone else, because it was truly frustrating.

This may sound like a rant, but going through the sequence of actions and errors that your users might experience, will enable you to design your application in a way that will delight the user, if not, lessen their frustration.

Comments

Anonymous said…
One reason to not verfy humanness first is it slows down the bots just that much, to make attacks slightly less effective.
March 12, 2008 at 11:43 AM
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