Ask HN: How many times do users mistype their password on a registration form? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many times do users mistype their password on a registration form?

2 pointsquilby3 comments

So in almost all registration forms users have to enter their password twice. Does anyone have any data on how many times users type different strings into the two fields? Id like to make my registration form only user-password-email and not user-password-passwordAgain-email to save my users some time.

I have only gotten the "passwords do not match" error a very few times, so I can assume that maybe 90%+ of the time users enter their password correctly the first time. For the 10% that don't, you can just hope that they entered their email correctly, and then just send their pass to their email. If they mistyped their pass and their email, than there is a problem...

I can't tell you about the password, but we had a registration form which asked for the e-mail address. You could actually read the e-mail address (like normal) so people could easily see and correct their typos had they bothered.

The thing is, they didn't. The e-mail address is used for activation and we had huge numbers of unactivated accounts. I don't have the exact numbers any more, so this is from memory: when we added another e-mail field and checked if they were the same, the number of unactivated accounts halved.

Currently, the number of unactivated accounts is consistently between 10% and 20%, so that should give you an indication on how much it saved us.

I can only assume that for passwords the problem of typos is worse, since you can't proofread.

It's not just the % of people mess this up. It's the cost of correcting each error. If 99.44% of people type their password correctly and remember it later, but the remaining 0.36% waste your time with support calls, it's a bad idea.

in my experience, typically, the registrations that have you type in just one copy of your password tend to also send you your password back in the registration email to verify.

if you're dealing with financial processes, though, i'd suggest sticking with the double password field and not emailing a password.

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