Pressing Enter vs. Clicking Login

How many of you fill out a login form and press enter to submit it rather than clicking the login button? I do 99% of the time.

So when I was trying to enter the AirMiles Spring Surprise Contest, I typed in my email address and password, checked off the “Remember Me” box, and hit enter.

But I wasn’t taken to the contest. The page reloaded and my password was gone. Herein lies UX problem number one – lots of people will just press enter instead of clicking the Login button. I did a little bit of searching to try and find out whether anyone has quantified the number of people who exhibit this behaviour, but the only thing I could find was a Facebook group of Enter-pressers that had 347 members… still, I suspect there are lots of you out there.

This is behaviour we’ve gotten used to because, on your typical web form, Enter does activate the Submit button (anyone out there ever used Google?). And yet, that doesn’t work here. Not only does it not work, it actually does something else that is completely counter-intuitive, which is to reload the page. I’ll admit I tried it a few times to see whether something was just broken before realizing that Enter wasn’t going to cut it and clicking Login instead.

But Wait, There’s More
On my third or fourth try pressing Enter, I noticed something else – when the page reloaded, anything that I’d entered on the form was getting appended to the query string in the URL. Including my password.

I was willing to forgive the “you can’t press Enter” thing. But this is unacceptable. If I was using a public computer (and a password that I also used for other things), anyone would be able to see that URL in the browser history and be able to log in as me.

The moral of this story? You have to think like your users when you’re designing stuff, and that goes right down to the little things like “if I was a user, how would I submit this form?”