Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Quick usability study feedback (v2)

I've launched the usability study to a small group of smart friends and am getting some good feedback.


Too small
I'm working on increasing the site's font and scaling up the captchas.


Need a clear stop/end point.
Even though the input doesn't care where you stop/start. Hey, you can even retype a few characters and it works; however, users feel lost without the delimiter. I'm considering adding more space between characters or maybe even a dash; however, the overlapping characters is what makes edge detection so hard.


Conflicting "it's too fast", "it's too slow" feedback.
Not sure what to do about this. I've done so many that I can do them very quickly.  The animations in the basic test were 7.2s long. Once you realize you can start anywhere, they take slightly less time to solve.

Colors!
 People want more color. I had some prettier early prototypes:
 
But there's too much color information. We were able to unroll and break it pretty easily. 

Unrolled version of the above Captcha where vertical strips are taken from each frame and laid side-by-side:
A4g5Ep2_ElE2BEhL9RmmV9cVQiYqbWbFrXhkDSBMYLIePBI50ly2pQo03tfXGp4P0pMjch5wKsgExt1NUO4 (300×960)
click to zoom

The current generation uses 15 colors or fewer. But I do miss the color.

What about Captcha Farms?
Captcha farms are an ongoing issue. Hopefully, the extra time it takes to read this captcha will make it a bit more expensive to farm out than the current $0.80 for 1000 entries. Once I get more usable numbers from the study, I'll know the success rate / times for both types of captcha.

There's a recent news cluster about decaptcha automated attacks being able to quickly break most captchas. When anyone can download a piece of software and crack them, then they've reached their end-of-life.

Variety
If you look at http://www.vappic.com/moreplease you'll see a mix of different attempts in there (you can just hit the skip button). Some are rather crazy with the camera others are "HD".

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