Comments on: Why Setting Initial Focus To Input Boxes Isn’t Always a Good Thing

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 06:48:17 +0000

Did you use your own Laptop or a public PC.

Only use ssl connection with your laptop. In case of a public pc. hands away!

By: kc

kc — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 20:47:07 +0000

Michael,
Tell me about it. My email account got hacked because I used an Internet Cafe in Toronto!

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 09:29:26 +0000

If you use cookies for login its is very important the server writes a encrypted cookie on your PC.

I am always very suspicious when passwords are stored as cookies. At home its OK, but if you use an Internet Cafe Shop…wow…this is a high security risk.

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 04 May 2005 13:39:39 +0000

Great examples, Ken. In light of these and the few others that I wrote about, I wonder how many times the benefits actually outweigh the drawbacks. In Google’s case, it seems to, but how many other cases are instances where it doesn’t?

In a project for work, I set up an interface for folks who unsubscribe from our email newsletter. Because some of the fields are pre-filled, I set the focus to the “reasons for ubsubscribing” box input box, which has given us very valuable feedback with which to improve our services.

Here’s an example

However, I wonder what contexts exist around this that are as annoying as the ones we’ve outlined. It’s a difficult thing to test.

By: Ken Norton

Ken Norton — Mon, 02 May 2005 15:06:34 +0000

Here’s another example where initial focus can be annoying - sites with lots of graphics and advertising. The focus usually isn’t set until the entire page finishes loading. By then, you might already be busy typing in a different field, only to have the focus shift away from you. A good (bad?) example is Yahoo! Maps. The focus is set to the address field, but only after the monster ad on the right is finished loading. In many cases I’ve already moved on to the city/state/zip field, and the switch is extremely frustrating, especially if you’re on dial-up. I’ve found several bank sites to have the same problem, focus shifts to the login field after I’ve already started typing my password into the password field, revealing the last few characters of my password.