Vista

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and to mark the occasion I’ve chosen highlight Molly Holzschlag as one of the women in technology who have inspired me to be who I am today.

Six years ago, exasperated, I typed “geeks london” into Google.  I had had enough of not being able to talk freely about the things that I felt passionately about and just wanted to find some like-minded people to chat with.  Fortuitously, like-minded people had set up a group for exactly that purpose and days later I snuck tentatively into my first Geek Dinner.

The invited speaker that evening was Molly, who had just published The Zen of CSS Design, co-authored with Dave Shea, creator of the CSS Zen Garden.  As a fan of semantic markup and separating content from style, I hope she had my full attention but, to be honest, I can’t remember for sure; I was too excited at being in a room full of geeks.  What did stick with me was that Molly was helping to shape decisions that were having an impact on the strategic development of the web at a high level.  Until then, I’d been under the impression that you needed to be some kind of boy wonder to be involved with that stuff, yet she was just a normal person, like you and me.  OK, way more knowledgeable than me (I don’t know about you) but, nonetheless, an approachable, fallible human being with all the usual fears, doubts and uncertainties that the rest of us struggle with.  Somehow that made the web feel more “ours” than “theirs” and that one day I might be able to do that too.

Since then Molly has continued to inspire me with her openness, inclusiveness, bravery and determination.  You can find her at http://molly.com/ and, more frequently, on Twitter as @mollydotcom.

I make a lot of purchases online and of late am having to deal with Verified by Visa (VbV) more often than I’d like.  Aside from whether or not I think such a process improves security or aids phishers, I have some serious issues with the way it’s conducted.

I have yet to complete the process, end-to-end, without having to detour through the “Forgot Password?” section, followed immediately after by a call to my bank, who then walk me through the reset and/or re-registration process.  The things that (often repeatedly) trip me up are:

1. Password restricted to no more than 10 characters I find it difficult enough to remember passwords without a false limit being imposed on their length – especially as I’ve been trying the increase the length of my passphrases because I’m under the (maybe false?) impression that the longer the passphrase the harder it’ll be to crack.
2. Name on Card I have learnt now that what this field is really after is my forename and surname.  Not my name as it’s actually written on the card.

   Also, during my most recent re-registration experience, it occurred to me to wonder if, as I was required to enter my name in lowercase during the registration process, should I be doing so during the actual verification process?  If so, there’s nothing to say I should.

3. Inconsistent date patterns For my date of birth, I am required to follow the pattern ddmmyy but for my card’s expiry date I am required to follow the pattern mmyyyy.  This is especially disconcerting because the pattern used ON my card is mmyy.
4. Obscuring non-password fields The values I enter in the “Card expiry date” and “Postcode” fields are obscured as they would be when entering a password, making it trickier for me to spot mistakes.  These are not fields that are typically obscured and it puzzles me why these are considered to be more sensitive than either my 3-digit security number or my date of birth.
5. Card expiry date This is not specific to the verification or “Forgot Password?” processes but a general database issue.  During my most recent re-registration process it was revealed to me by the person walking me through it that a mistake had been made the previous time and my card expiry date erroneously recorded as “2100″.  Given that Visa set the maximum lifetime period for their cards, it should be possible to use today’s date to calculate the upper limit for a valid expiry date and use that to identify and flag up such mistakes to prevent them getting as far as the database.

I find it difficult to believe that Visa would consider this good customer experience so and as, so far, they’ve not had to take the brunt of my annoyance each time the process has broken down (I love you First Direct, really I do) , this evening I’ve written to them so that I can be sure that they’ve at least been alerted to these issues.

Although I’m sure there are many people who remember their password each time and sail through effortlessly, my experiences have been so consistently bad that I find it hard to believe I’m alone in this.  If you’ve had the same/simliar/completely different issues with Verified by Visa, I’d love to hear about them.