the password conundrum

I recently switched my home Internet service from Covad DSL to Comcast Teleworker1.  Almost everything has gone swimmingly so far: signing up online was painless, the tech came out within the assigned window and he was very nice and professional, and my new service is So Much Faster.

After the tech had everything hooked up, I went online to create my account so that I could view my bill and have yet another email address.  They wanted me to create a password of 8-16 characters in length, and that includes 1 upper-case letter, 1 lower-case letter, and one number or special-character.  This is fine by me, since all of my passwords meet these requirements2.  So I fired up 1Password, set it to generate a password that meets these requirements, and put it into the form.  After doing so, I saw this:Comcast said that my password was a good password

I filled out the rest of the page, and I got the following error message:

The password you entered doesn’t meet the minimum criteria for a safe password. Use between 8 and 16 characters with at least 1 lower-case letter, 1 upper-case letter, and 1 number or special character (no spaces, case sensitive).

So I checked my generated password.  In fact, I’ll share it with you, since I couldn’t use it: r9H4ybnAyf+Acw.  It’s the right length (14 characters), it’s of mixed case, it’s got a number, and it’s got a special character too.  As a geek, I know that the + in there could cause a problem, so I generated another password.  This one had a } in it, which also caused a problem.  I went through three more automatically-generated passwords until I finally got one that was acceptable.

There are two user experience issues here:

  1. They have a limited subset of special characters, but they don’t tell you what that subset is.
  2. When you enter your password, the form is validating whether the password is a good one.  However, their validation isn’t correct, since the page says that a password is good, but then the system kicks back an error on submission.  Don’t tell me that my password is good when you won’t accept it!

Strangely, the former point is actually addressed when creating additional accounts.  The page for creating a secondary account is different than the one used for the primary account, and the password field there includes this descriptive text:

8-16 characters. At least one upper case letter, at least one lower case letter, and at least one number or special character (! @ # $ % ^ & *) are required. No spaces. Case-sensitive.

This would have saved me a few erroneous form submissions if they had told me this when I was creating my account!  The basic information is still the same, but they specify which special characters are acceptable.

Many companies forget about the first user experience.  I make fun of unboxing videos, but getting your new item out of the packaging is part of the user experience.  Your first few minutes are where your first impression gets created, and that first impression is an important one.  It sets your expectations.  By not paying attention to the details of your first user experience, you can inadvertently set expectations that you don’t want set.  On one hand, I’m happy that Comcast is enforcing passwords that are more secure than usual.  On the other hand, I’m not happy that they don’t give me all of the information that I need.  It means that I don’t entirely trust them now.

  1. Yes, I’m well aware of the issues that some folks have experienced with Comcast.
  2. Well, to be completely accurate, this isn’t true.  I have several passwords that are longer than 16 characters.

every time a smartphone rings, an IT support guy gets his wings

Some holiday cheer from your friends at VMware:

It’s possible that I find this video so funny because it was filmed on-campus and because I’ve had meetings with some of those people in those conference rooms.  Even so: it’s three minutes gently poking fun at It’s a Wonderful Life.

By the way, for those of you who are in the Bay Area, did you know that the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto always plays It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve?

2011 retrospective

Or, Nadyne’s greatest hits of 2011: the posts that were most read and that got the most search traffic.

Unsurprisingly, my post about the availability of the vSphere Client for iPad got a lot of traffic this year.  I expect that last week’s post about the new vSphere Client for Mac will hit next year’s list for most-read.  People like news about new Mac and iPad applications. Given that I was getting traffic for relevant search results before the releases of these apps, I’m sure that this will continue.

Some of my Mac geekery posts got more traffic than I expected.  Giving up on Safari and hating the Apple Store turned out to be popular.  I wouldn’t’ve guessed that.

All of my posts about career opportunities at VMware got a lot of traffic, too.  This is very good to see, because my team will continue to grow in 2012.  If one of your resolutions for 2012 is going to be to find a new job, you should ping me to learn about how awesome it is to work here.

User experience posts have gotten great traffic and search hits, such as research is not regurgitation and my post about creating VMware’s first internal UX conference.  My about page is also getting a lot of hits, which probably means that I’m overdue for updating it.  I admit that I’m also quite pleased that my post about search engine optimization is getting a lot of traffic, and I’d be very happy if that continues into 2012.

Also unsurprisingly, a bunch of my old posts about Office:Mac are still doing well in terms of search traffic.  Someone from my old team should pick up the blogging slack over there, since I think that this means that there’s an unmet need in terms of information coming out of that team.  Schwieb, Rick, I’m looking at you!

Thankfully, this analysis of my traffic isn’t telling me that I need to change up a lot.  Posts about VMware and user experience are getting me a lot of traffic.  My biggest learning from this is that my about page needs some love.  I was just thinking that I should update my LinkedIn profile too, so that all fits in together.

What do you want to see more (or less) of from me in 2012?

VMware View Client for Mac available now

Ever since I joined VMware last year, one of the top search hits for this blog has been “vmware view mac” and variants.  Today, I have great news: there is now an application to match that search.  Yes, VMware View Client is now available for the Mac — and it’s also joined by a View Client for Linux, an updated View Client for iPad, and a View Client for Android.  For more details, check out Pat Lee’s blog post.

To download the new View Client for Mac, start here.  That’s got the download link, the readme (yes, you should read the readme!), and a forum for providing feedback to us.

Go forth and download!

poor kids have no work ethic, he says

For those of you who don’t care about my political views, you should skip this post.

I’ve never been a fan of Newt Gingrich.  When I lived in his district, I voted against him at every opportunity.  So it’s with no surprise that I see that he’s now denigrating poor kids:

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday.

Really, Newt?

I was one of those poor kids.  I watched my parents show up every Monday, and they stayed all day.  They worked hard.  They also made a couple of mistakes along the way, and they got unlucky.  I watched my dad work 80 hours per week as an EMT so that he could try to make enough money for our family, and I saw what happened when he hurt his back on the job.  Although my parents worked hard and showed up every Monday, I still had free lunches in school.  I started earning money when I was 10 by shoveling snow. I started babysitting when I got a bit older.  According to my Social Security statement, my first on-the-books job came when I was 13, a hot and sweaty summer spent whacking weeds at the local water treatment plant1.  When college time came, my parents couldn’t help, and I got through my degrees with a combination of scholarships, grants, student loans, and jobs.

I grew up poor, and I still got a good work ethic from my parents.  I worked my way through college.  I still work hard today.  And I’m deeply offended that you would try to tell me that I had no-one around me who showed me the importance of showing up to work on Monday because my parents weren’t rich.  Through a lot of hard work, and also some luck, I was able to get to where I am today.  I have a great job which pays me a salary such that I’m now paying back into the system that gave me those free lunches and subsidized loans, and still leaves enough left over for me to do things like buy a house and a Mercedes.

And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.  Apparently Newt Gingrich, with his oh-so-extensive experience in being part of the working poor, doesn’t realize this.  Gingrich doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to work his way out of that kind of situation, but he spouts off about it as if it’s just a work ethic that keeps the working poor from succeeding.

  1. In fact, I’ve still got a scar on my face from that summer.

sometimes you don’t want search engine optimization

I ordered Mother’s Day flowers for my mother from From You Flowers, and they didn’t arrive on time.  Not only did they not arrive on time, but they didn’t inform me of the issue.  When I contacted them about the issue, they pretty much blew me off; after a month, they gave me a $3 refund.  So I blogged about it, talking about when a satisfaction guarantee isn’t.

That, I thought, was the end of it: I got exceptionally bad service from From You Flowers, they didn’t care, and now I know about an online florist that I will never use again.  But today, I received the following email:

Hi there,

My name is [redacted] and I am an online marketer working with FromYouFlowers.com.

I discovered the link to FromYouFlowers at [http://www.nadynerichmond.com/blog/page/5]. I really appreciate this link but would like to ask you to “update” this link with a more specific URL and/or anchor text. 

Here is an example of the html code details below:

<a title=”From You Flowers” href=”http://www.fromyouflowers.com” target=”_blank”>

Thanks for your time!

That’s so awesome.  They want me to update my blog post so that it has better search-engine optimization.

I wrote back:

Hi [redacted],

I’ve got to ask: are you joking, or did you not actually read the blog post in question?  You want to make sure that my blog post, in which I excoriate your client for its terrible service and for not living up to its satisfaction guarantee, uses the title attribute in my HTML for SEO purposes?

Regards,
Nadyne.

This whole thing has been immensely instructive.  Not only have I learned about an online florist that I will never use again and that I will actively steer my friends and family away from, I’ve now also learned about an online marketer who I could never use either.  My mother didn’t get her flowers on time, and the bouquet didn’t look like what was pictured, but I might have gotten my money’s worth anyway.

tell me more

This morning, I conducted some research with one of our customer councils.  I asked them some questions about how they go about things today, and then let one of the designers on my team show them some of his very early design thinking about how we want to improve matters in the future.  It was a great session: the participants gave me great information about the current state of affairs, and they also had great feedback about what we presented them and how they could see it fitting into their life.

At the end of the session, someone commented about how I got people talking.  I told them that my secret to getting people to talk boils down to three words: “tell me more”.  Sometimes I’ll provide additional directions, like “tell me more about what happens after the email arrives”, but the basic concept is still the same.  It’s a short prompt to get someone to add in more details or to give clarification. Then I can use this additional information to ask additional questions, get feedback from others, or be able to ensure that what I think that I’ve heard is complete and correct.

People want to be understood, and they want to provide the right level of detail to you.  “Tell me more” tells them that you’re not sure that you’ve understood or that you’re not sure yet if you have the right information from them.  There’s a lot of meaning packed into those three words.  Using them helps you do a better job of gathering data when you’re conducting research.