Today I helped two women register on Wikipedia, observing them from behind their shoulder. In both cases, while they were typing the username of choice, which started with their first name, the JavaScript red box warning popped up to alert that the username was taken. Both stopped typing to look at the warning, mildly alarmed, and I had to encourage them to just continue typing.
The warning, while helpful and an improvement over reloading the form, is unnecessarily distracting and alarming in many cases.
- A simple improvement might be to "fire" the warning only some (fraction of) seconds after the user has stopped typing.
- Alternatively, the level of alarm should be more carefully dosed. For instance it could start as a green informative box "you're doing well, but continue typing" for simple clashes and become a red warning e.g. when a titleblacklist rule was hit.
It would be interesting to know how many times we're showing the warning.
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