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Buzzkill
by Tim McCoy
I’ve been struggling for days to put into words my reaction to the launch of Google Buzz. But the phrase I can’t get out of my head is “HOW could they screw up THIS MUCH?” Well here’s how: Google took Gmail, one of the most widely used web services on... (Continue)
Alternate dimensions
by Daniel Kuo
If you’re a typical designer working in the software world, the majority of products you’ll create will have strictly two dimensional interfaces — length & width only, pixels on the screen. As interfaces have evolved over the years many have gained a very simple kind of "depth": lighting effects, drop... (Continue)
An Insurgency of Quality
by Alan Cooper
Dave Hussman, one of the leaders of the post-agile movement, recently hosted a one-day conference on the topic of “Redesigning Agility”, and invited me to give a plenary talk. The focus of the conference and my talk were how to integrate agile development with interaction design. I was very... (Continue)

Remembering to remember

by Daniel Kuo on January 13, 2009
amazon_login.gif

You are shopping on Amazon. You add something to your cart, and you decide to checkout. Amazon asks you for your account information. "Enter your e-mail address," it says. You do. Underneath that are two radio buttons. One says "I am a new customer." The other says "I am a returning customer," and offers a field for your password. You click, or tab, to the next field and enter your password. You hit enter, or click the sign in button — it makes no difference to Amazon because this is what it replies:

You clicked on the button indicating you're a new customer, but you also provided a password. If you're a new customer, please do not enter a password yet (we'll ask you to create one later). If you're a returning customer, please click on the button indicating that you already have a password, then type in your password.

You are confused and dismayed. You did NOT click on the button indicating you are a new customer! (What button?! The only button in the page says "Sign in!") You realize the default on this login page is set to "new customer." You wonder why it does not understand your intentions. It could see that you have entered a password, yet it did not bother to query the database; or, why did it not simply toggle the radio button as you tabbed or clicked into the password field?

You get the feeling Amazon holds some kind of institutional animosity towards you, like being sent to the back of the line at the DMV because you made a slight error on one of their forms.

But you forget about this, until the next time, and the time after that...

Filed under: Critiques, Interaction design

Daniel Kuo

Since joining Cooper in 2005, Daniel has lead visual interface design and branding efforts for products including medical devices, browser-based rich internet applications, enterprise software, and consumer products.


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Comments

On Jan 13, 2009, Geof Harries said:

This is a design decision that has always puzzled me. As a returning Amazon customer, I have to manually change the radio button to suit my needs, yet one assumes there are more existing customers than new people using this form on a regular basis. Shouldn't the convenience be granted to my user group and not the other?

On Feb 14, 2009, g said:

Geof: use Firefox, it saves your pwd (:

 

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