I’m wondering if these developers do this on purpose or they are just random people in our profession? I was trying to sign up at this Web site. Had to enter my email and pick a password, which I did. Nobody warned me that the password had to be 8 characters until I pressed the submit button. Then the new window popped up:

Just take a look and try to recreate the line of thinking of the developer of this piece of art:

“I need to let the user enter the password that’s at least 8 characters long. So I’ll hide in the bushes and will quietly wait till the user will make a mistake and enter a shorter password. Then I’ll chuckle: one more fell into my trap. Then I’ll add a cool Whoops message. The instructor in our vocational evening classes told us that the error messages should be shown in red. Makes sense. Let me google how to display the text in red. Got it. There is a Font tag with an attribute color. It was easy. Done.  It would be nice to add a counter to know how many people will enter a short password.  I hope it’ll be covered in the Advanced Programming class that I’m planning to take next year”.

Why some developers hate users so much? The prompt in the password field reads “Enter a password”. Why not add the helpful text prompting to enter at least 8 characters?

Maybe this developer was a rookie? And the QA engineer didn’t notice? And the manager never tried to sign up? And the site owner didn’t care?

It’s all about caring. If you care about your users, you’ll find a way to do it right.

And the biggest irony is that the name of this Web site is Skills Matter. Indeed. That’s why I’m not going to sign up for their services.

Update. Two days after writing this blog I decided to registered at the Vimeo video site. They were also hiding in the bushes with the same password length error. Is is something wrong with me? Am I being too picky?