Last modified: 2014-11-07 08:47:06 UTC
Today I helped two women register on Wikipedia, observing them from behind their shoulder. In both cases, while they were typing the username of choice, which started with their first name, the JavaScript red box warning popped up to alert that the username was taken. Both stopped typing to look at the warning, mildly alarmed, and I had to encourage them to just continue typing. The warning, while helpful and an improvement over reloading the form, is unnecessarily distracting and alarming in many cases. * A simple improvement might be to "fire" the warning only some (fraction of) seconds after the user has stopped typing. * Alternatively, the level of alarm should be more carefully dosed. For instance it could start as a green informative box "you're doing well, but continue typing" for simple clashes and become a red warning e.g. when a titleblacklist rule was hit. It would be interesting to know how many times we're showing the warning.
(In reply to Nemo from comment #0) > * A simple improvement might be to "fire" the warning only some (fraction > of) seconds after the user has stopped typing. We already do that – the username is checked 250 ms after the user stops typing (plus a couple milliseconds for the API request). This delay was mostly added to prevent unnecessary network requests rather than as user experience improvement, perhaps it should be increased.
(In reply to Bartosz Dziewoński from comment #1) > This delay was > mostly added to prevent unnecessary network requests rather than as user > experience improvement, perhaps it should be increased. Worth trying, IMHO. I think it's safe to assume the user takes at least 1 second to type password twice and confirm the form?
Related: https://meta.wikimedia.org/?oldid=10448120
Change 171806 had a related patch set uploaded by Nemo bis: Let users type their username for 1 s during registration before barking https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/171806
Change 171806 merged by jenkins-bot: Let users type their username for 1 s during registration before barking https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/171806
Nice, let's see how it goes.
