Password reset UX results in users repeatedly resetting password

I’m not really sure if this genuinely is UX, but it is probably a bit pedantic to be in the ‘bug’ Category.

I’ve noticed that a lot of our users seem to forget their passwords, and when they try to invoke the Password Reset they get this dialog. All good so far.

So they click ‘Reset Password’ and they get this message in green, in the top of the same dialog:

The problem being that although they have clearly successfuly created a password reset email, and should be going to look in their email for the reset email, the dialog still says ‘Reset Password’. A number of our users then press again. And they get the same dialog, so they press again.

Sooner or later they get bored of this and go look in their email where there are now several password reset emails.

Crucially, only the most recent of these will work. If a user uses any of the older ones, it doesn’t work.

Cue email to me to ask why Password Reset doesn’t seem to work. In every case I have been able to resolve the user’s issue by asking them to go through their emails carefully and click on ONLY the most recent of the reset emails, and it works.

The problems to me seems to be that the Password reset dialog doesn’t seem to give an obvious enough indication of success (yes I know - huge green alert you would think is enough!) but the persistence of the Reset Password button seems to mislead some users into thinking they need to press again (perhaps they’re thinking it’s some form of ‘Confirm Password Reset’ secondary button. It’s only by the 3rd (or in some cases 18th) click that they realise it isn’t.

So: I am suggesting that the Password Reset dialog provides a more obvious cue of success by having larger text in the green box, and that once you have successfully achieved the sending of a password reset, the ‘Reset Password’ button should disappear, and be replaced with a button that simply closes the dialog, such as ‘OK’ or ‘Close’ or something.

Marcus

7 Likes

I do not think the green text needs to change but I agree the button should definitively indicate the action was performed, perhaps by changing to plain text with “email sent” or similar. @neil can you take this next week?

2 Likes

@codinghorror Awesome, thank you!
Marcus

Sure, I’ll change that. I think the entire modal should be replaced with another one like this:

6 Likes

Sure whatever is easiest, that might be better.

I made this change today. The “forgot password” modal will be replaced with the confirmation modal I posted above.

3 Likes

Thanks @neil and @codinghorror, yet another unbelievably fast fix to an
issue! I keep using Discourse as an example of how open source development
should be done!

M

2 Likes