It would be quite obvious to say that twitter has become the largest growing social networking site today. You already must be connected with this popular service.
What’s happening? Yes, this is what users share on twitter and get connected with their friends, colleagues & family by just sharing what they are doing, in 140 characters. It is brilliant indeed.
But we, the web developers see a website, web apps in a different way. I am also using the tweetmeme service associated with twitter for this blog. We also love to do what other users do, but we always look for better ideas and we follow these popular websites. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that these popular websites are followed as a standard for all the web developers. We always try to find things which made such websites so popular in the world. We look for better ideas which can attract more users on our websites. In short, this is something we call ‘Usability’.
You will be surprised to know that twitter has usability issues, YES! this is true. Recently, while helping one of my colleague to create his account on twitter I came across some usability issues with twitter sign-up page validations. I was surprised to see such issues on a popular social networking site like twitter. If it’s hard for you to believe me then try to replicate the same issue which I found after following these steps:
- Open twitter signup page: https://twitter.com/account/create
- Enter a single character in all the fields: Full Name, Username, Password, Email
- Leave captcha validation field blank, which says: ‘Type the words above’
- Click on “Create my account”
You will see a page like shown below:
- Screenshot: Twitter Signup Usability Issue
Usability issues while submitting the signup form:
- Full Name:
I just entered “s” in this field and after clicking on “create my account”, it is showing me “OK”. Do you know anyone who is having his/her full name in only one character? - Username:
Same way, no one wants to have a user name with single character unless he is creator of the website itself. We always tell users to have an unique user name with at least 4-5 characters. Isn’t a usability bug? It also shwon me inline error when I was typing username as “s” saying “It is already taken” but it failed to show me the proper error message after clicking on “create my account” button. - Password:
It is correct! It caught the error and was showing me message that “Too short” - Email: I entered “s” again but it shown me “OK”. Have you seen someone’s email address, which is having only one character? Strange! it failed to catch the validation error.
- Captcha:
It was correct! It was showing me proper error message with red colored text saying: “Please try to match the 2 words shown above, or try the audio version.” Note that twitter is using reCAPTCHA for spam protection.
I am a big fan of twitter and love it the same way you do. The main purpose of pointing out such usability issues in a popular website like twitter is to spread the word and let twitter developers see this and fix these bugs. I will keep an eye on the signup page and will update this article as soon as twitter acts on it.
Please let us know your thoughts in comments.
Hi, interesting your point of view on the usability of the twitter sign-up.
I don’t agree your point that the full name and username must contain more than 1 character, unlike it’s an issue I think it’s usable, why limit a user who just to be known as a single character?
Besides the e-mail validation bug, the only usability issue I see is the shortage coming feedback of the ‘too short password’ message, this message have to contain the minimum requirement specification to aid the user resolving it.
In addition the usability of this type of captcha is arguable. For example a simple math question, like 1+1, is more usable te be filled in.
Greets
Jasper
@Jasper, Thanks a lot for writing your views here:
I totally agree with your point on allowing users to have single character username. I just tried pointing out the most generic way of validating a username field. Twitter also did it, when you start typing username in the filed it searches for the availability and shows the error message that “it is already taken” but it don’t show up same error after submitting the form and I think it should show up rather than showing up “OK”.
I agree with your point on captcha and making it more easy for users. Popular websites like Facebook, New York Times, twitter etc are using reCAPTCHA and it has become the most popular spam protection tool to use with forms. According to recent stats published on wikipedia, reCAPTCHA reported to solve 200 million captchas every day. But again like you said, when we talk about usability, it should be usable and more easy.