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Software registration keys – design for usability

Software registration keys are a necessary evil these days for everyone who buys legitimate software (while the pirates continue to merrily steal their copies).

This post on Coding Horror provides some solid lessons on how a bit of sensible design can really make users lives easier.

Using letters and numbers that look similar, such as O and 0 or G and 6.
Making bad typeface choices that further blur the differentiability of letters and numbers. As an interesting aside, the typeface used on this blog is Georgia, which does differentiate between O (capital oh) and 0 (zero) somewhat. I had to change the typeface to Arial in the dot-point above to emphasise my point.
Not separating characters into blocks like phone numbers. AC4 561 226 DEC B12 C8A is easier for us poor humans to read than AC4561226DECB12C8A.
Lazy programming that forces users to enter the key without spaces or with dashes.
Hiding the key somewhere inside the manual.