Captcha is a usability nightmare
Posted by jason, Sat Dec 01 00:09:00 UTC 2007
My guess is that you have seen one of these widgets on the Internet in the last few months.
Spam has branched out with a vengeance and is no longer just a threat to the sanity of your email inbox. From blogs to web forms to twitter, bots are attacking anything that is remotely accessible to automated data entry. This, in the simplest of cases, presents headaches for blog owners and site administrators and in the worst of cases, can render applications useless, similar to a DOS attack.
This is very unfortunate.
CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing (Test to Tell) Computers (and) Humans Apart, is meant to do just that…force the humans to do something that bots would not be able to do if they were spidering through a site…in the case above, discern some distorted letters and enter them into a form before continuing. The often-noticed downside is that due to the cleverness of developers, CAPTCHA has had to become so bizarre-looking, it has introduced a frustrating experience to users who want to simply sign up for a web site or application.
In essence, developers have chosen to place the onus and (ultimately) frustration on their users instead of dealing with the issue of spam themselves. Beyond the obvious accessibility issues (which have been addressed by some methods, including audio), CAPTCHA can take a simple sign-up form and make it a negative and delayed experience…not the first impression you want to make with your site or application. The truth is that I have struggled with correctly answering CAPTCHA widgets like the one above, so I can only imagine what it would be like for my parents, grandparents, people with even slight vision impairment, etc.
While I don’t want to put the blame solely on Google, it seems that they were one of the first companies to mainstream this approach…and it is sad that it has caught on like it has. In my opinion, CAPTCHA is a poor interaction to force a user to contend with. Simply put, there have to be better alternatives out there. In my follow-up article, I will highlight some alternative methods to using CAPTCHA. Hopefully, we can find better solutions that will remove this ugly addition to the cost that users must pay for irresponsible behavior on the web.