Few irritating captcha's - Image verification

"Oh God! Its irritating. Am trying to finish this form, but this image-verification is killing my time and patience. "

This is not from my mouth. This is what I have seen some user say while filling forms in few websites. The worst part is they don't understand the characters in image. Some time its so tough that they don't understand 50% of the characters. We all know that Captcha helps preventing the softwares from autofill.

Another user says

"I tried to change the captcha and whole data is lost. Again i have to re enter the data. Then once again captcha is not clear & I clicked 'show different image' and whole page refreshed and all the datas I entered was lost and I never filled the form in that website & all my friends faced the same issue."

"CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. - Wikipedia

Yes - we all have experienced some way of other with different types captcha used in web. Below are some Good and Bad example of captcha.

Good Captchas - easy to understand for users

This captcha is pretty straight forward. User need no second thought.

Look at this recaptcha, its so simple and user has option to listen to audio on worst case.

Pretty straight forward

Its simple & no issues in understanding the text from image.

Next two is from msn. Some images are difficult to understand, but its rare. Its also accessible for users with disabled. Even normal users can user the audio to enter the information

Another screen shot from msn.

This is from Google. Very-very easy to understand and also easy for visually challenged.

Bad Captcha - by which user gets irritated and big loss for business

Oops - Captcha with encryption. its time consuming and prone to mistakes. And its not accessible & easy to use for visually challenged.

Below image is readable, but not accessible. No audio facility.

Oops - one of the worst.

Ooops - not again, this captcha is bad.

facebooks captcha- few characters are difficult to understand. Below one is easy though.

user experience and usability in NetVibes

user interface

First and foremost thing I noticed was, in the User Interface there is no Logo of NetVibes Used. It enhances the User Experience by making user feel it more personal. Netvibes thinks one step ahead of not promoting their brand Logo. Visual Hierarchy of the site is very good. Each and every widget can be customized with different color based on our priority and interest. This facility is basic among all personalisation web applications. Unique thing in this user interface is you can share the widget (netvibe calls module)via messanger, mail, on blog or myspace.

Design Patterns

Comparing with the personalisation application like My Yahoo or Google or MSN, even NetVibes has followed the same approach of consistency in Design Pattern and which is in sync with the site behaviour.

Usability

Simplicity is the main mantra for the increase in ease of use - usability in Netvibes. Once we login, user immediately finds very common interest readymade available. And starts filling. When I felt that Iam not registered, they show a modal window for registration and its easy to register. Usability is taken care even in Modal Window. While tabbing to each field, it shows the system status by highlighting the label and shows tick mark when we move to next row to show that information provided is correct.

Over all its cooool application with good usability and intuitive user interface.

Suggest Usability