Improve your forgot password forms

Sooner or later, you will forget your password for that one site you haven't used in ages. When that happens, you'll have trouble even recalling what email address you used to register. Happily, you know your username, hit forgot password, and then you get that crazy message that says that the new password was sent to the email address on file. But which email address is it? You have no clues whatsoever.

There are a number of solutions for such an issue. One would be adding a forgot email form that asks you some personal information available in your account, so that you can prove you are indeed... yourself. This won't really work as it would require the user to input more unnecessary information upon registration. This results in bigger forms and lower conversion rates.

A second option would be using the email address to identify the user that requests a new password. Yet again, this isn't perfect as one may have multiple addresses and bad memory. I wouldn't want to go trough my 20 (just a number) email addresses only to figure out the last one I try was the one used with this site.

The perfect solution

I think the best way to fix these problems would be by using either one of the username and email address fields, or perhaps both of them. If one doesn't remember the email address, but knows the username, the form would respond to something like: your new password has been sent to partly**********@********visible.mail. Now when you see part of your email address over there, you know where to look for a new password.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any other solutions, please share them using the comments. You can also stay updated to upcoming articles via the rss feed.

Published on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 1:01 pm in techniques, usability.

About Bogdan Pop

Bogdan Pop is a young Romanian entrepreneur who runs WebRaptor. He is a web developer with awesome design skills, who enjoys writing about everyday's work and usability. He relaxes by taking photos every once in a while and by mixing french electronic music. Connect with him via Twitter.