As I will complain at length in some future article, an amazing number of websites mess up some of the most fundamental operations their users will ever have to perform: logins and password reminders.

Here we have an example from fotolog. Can you spot the problem?

fotologreminder.jpg

I’ve not only forgotten my password, I’ve forgotten my username. How should I remember, when I have usernames on dozens (if not hundreds) of other sites, they all differ in their norms and requirements, and the page offers me no clue as to the format of the username. Is it my email address? I tried that – the text box won’t allow me to enter that many characters; at least that gives me a clue. Is it “deirdre”? I entered that, and the “authentication test”, and fotolog told me that a password reset had been sent to my email address.

Fortunately, I actually remembered which of my many email addresses this should come to. But nothing came. After a while it occurred to me that I probably wasn’t the first deirdre to sign up on fotolog. I tried “deirdres”. At least here it gave me some feedback: no such user exists. I finally remembered that my fotolog username is deirdrestraughan, and was able to recover the password.