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 C8Ais easier for us poor humans to read thanAC4561226DECB12C8A. - Lazy programming that forces users to enter the key without spaces or with dashes.
- Hiding the key somewhere inside the manual.
Read the full post for other examples.
