I did a study trying to find out what problems undergraduate information management and computer science students had with passwords, by beefing up the system logs to record all password submissions on a web-based examination ap and then me interpreting them without help from the people who made the mistake (ie. I could have categorised them wrong).

Here's what I say I found: about 15 percent of password problems (when a password submitted at a password prompt is incorrect) are typing related. The vast bulk of errors were to do with having too many passwords - see below. So, the proposed solutions could help a bit, but won't tackle the main problem.

Problem type	Proportion	Description of problem
Expired Pwd	37%	Using an expired password instead of the currently valid one.
Substitution	15%	Using some password like sequence of characters instead of the currently valid password.
Enter	9%	Pressing Enter before typing a password – no password was entered in the login attempt
Omission	6%	Omitting a necessary character from an otherwise correct password
Addition	5%	Having an unnecessary character in an otherwise correct password
Partial Recall	5%	Recalling part of a password, but not the rest of it
Distribution	4%	A problem occurred during the initial distribution of the account details
System Error	3%	A malfunction in the password mechanism
Replacement	2%	Having incorrect characters in an otherwise correct password
Blend	1%	Mixing parts of passwords together
Capitalisation	1%	Using the wrong capitalisation in all or part of a password
Userid	1%	Entering the username instead of the password

Sacha

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bj@altern.org [mailto:bj@altern.org]
> Sent: 19 January 2004 00:45
> To: kde-usability@kde.org
> Subject: Allowing No Hide mode in passwords
>
>
> Hello !
>
> First post to this list :-). As maintainer of KGpg, a user
> told me he was
> using long passwords, and that it was hard to tell if he made
> a mistake
> because currently KPasswordDialog only displays
> ************** when you type
> a password. He would like to be able to actually see the
> password he is
> typing.
>
> I think this could be a usability enhancement (for example
> for people that
> have problem with typing)
>