First off: I’m not really well-versed in terms of UX design, so these next guesses are as good as anyone’s:
- Six boxes communicate “== six digits, != password” (try to imagine the least tech-savvy user)
- Some people might not be able to quickly hold six digits in their head at once (especially seems to be the case with older people, from my experience), so seeing “I’ve already got two/three/four” visually is potentially an efficiency boost. This also correlates (again, just from my anecdotal experience) with the population that doesn’t have a password manager handling 2FA for them automatically…
- This is probably down to preference, but IMO it also feels faster somehow than a single input field with six digits, when it works properly (with the caveat that it feels much worse/slower if it doesn’t work)
- Now that everyone does it, you’re kinda forced to adopt it as well for recognizability.
But it’s an interesting question – we can’t ever imagine entering postal ZIP codes like that and yet that’s an area where it’d actually make more sense since there’s usually some notion of “more significant” digits at the start vs. end, so you could perhaps do some cool tricks with regard to pre-filtering state, city etc. names. Whereas OTP codes are (AFAIK) essentially fully random digits with no meaningful distinction.
I have two products in the wild with PIN entry for kiosk users that have a regular text input field. I have been asked if it could be the typical single digit boxes thing like this, but _never_ by the actual kiosk users. The kiosk users don’t celebrate my input type choice either. It just goes to show that most users won’t even see the details unless they are impacted by those choices.
Another peeve I have with this type of input is when entering the last digit automatically submits the form. Once I fat-fingered the last digit and was about to hit backspace, but it was too late, the form submitted and verification failed. I had to wait an excruciating amount of time for the SMS send rate limit to expire before I could try again (I no longer remember which service this was for).
On their website, when I enter a digit, the cursor advances to the next input box automatically. Deleting a digit with backspace also jumps back to the previous box. Seems to work perfectly for me. Maybe fixed since yesterday?
Read a bit further and the reason they had the issue was their uncommon keyboard layout, which is one that requires holding the shift key to access numeric digits. This broke the input filtering logic.
Web developer classic: use Javascript to replace the native, working, internationally supported standard inputs with a different input mechanism that doesn't work.
(saving you a click: AZERTY has digits on the shift key, and for some reason the JS is handling raw keys rather than processed characters)
My most hated one is not allowing me to right-click to open a context menu, or even worse, making right-click act the same as left-click, redirecting me to some page I never intended to go to.
Same. Whenever I visit a website and it has that ridiculous scroll-smoothing JavaScript, I get so annoyed because I have pixel-level trackpad scrolling on macOS and they're just making it feel terrible.
I'm not so surprised, given that you cannot write support tickets if the bug prevents you from registering...
Also, I don't think people have high hopes that a broken government website will ever get fixed.
It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.
- Six boxes communicate “== six digits, != password” (try to imagine the least tech-savvy user)
- Some people might not be able to quickly hold six digits in their head at once (especially seems to be the case with older people, from my experience), so seeing “I’ve already got two/three/four” visually is potentially an efficiency boost. This also correlates (again, just from my anecdotal experience) with the population that doesn’t have a password manager handling 2FA for them automatically…
- This is probably down to preference, but IMO it also feels faster somehow than a single input field with six digits, when it works properly (with the caveat that it feels much worse/slower if it doesn’t work)
- Now that everyone does it, you’re kinda forced to adopt it as well for recognizability.
But it’s an interesting question – we can’t ever imagine entering postal ZIP codes like that and yet that’s an area where it’d actually make more sense since there’s usually some notion of “more significant” digits at the start vs. end, so you could perhaps do some cool tricks with regard to pre-filtering state, city etc. names. Whereas OTP codes are (AFAIK) essentially fully random digits with no meaningful distinction.
Anecdotally, this seems to be the case on the majority of websites where I have to use such 2FA codes.
From Wikipedia, I get to https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.bou...
That has one live link: https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou..., but from there, the trail runs dead.
Do you have a link?
PDF link in the box on the right.
(saving you a click: AZERTY has digits on the shift key, and for some reason the JS is handling raw keys rather than processed characters)
Crazy to add complexity like this.