I Hate Captchas!

18th January 2012

There’s nothing more annoying than having to fill out a lengthy form and then be faced with a Captcha.

It should be simple – you’re given two words to enter into a box to prove that you’re a person and not a bot looking to send some spam.

However, more often than not the words are too difficult to decipher – you hit the refresh button in the hope of getting some “easier” words only to find that you’ve been provided with something even more incomprehensible.

It’s also unclear what exactly you have to enter – do you need to include the commas, full stops, and semicolons that are sometimes displayed? Are the words case sensitive? This is never clear to me and it seems to change from site to site.

Given all the confusion the inevitable happens – you enter the wrong characters and are then asked to “guess” again – only this time you find that details you previously entered into the form have now been removed and you have to go back and add them again!

Whilst Captchas do help address the problem of spam, site owners have to consider whether they’re really worth the potential cost. They can create a very frustrating and irritating interaction experience for users and several studies have found they can have a negative impact on form completion rates.

Captchas are the wrong approach – they pass the responsibility for dealing with spam onto users when it should be technology that deals with this issue.

Nobody enjoys filling out forms which makes it imperative that they’re quick and simple to complete and contain nothing more than is absolutely essential.

By using a Captcha you add an irritating barrier that stops users from easily signing up for your newsletter, purchasing your product, or asking for a quote on a new project.

This doesn’t make sense – you’re making things more difficult at exactly the point you want everything to be simple, smooth, and straightforward.

I think part of the appeal of using Captchas is that they’re effective at what they do (i.e. dealing with spam) and very easy to add to forms. But that’s not necessarily a good reason for using them – the focus must be on the user and what’s easiest for them.

If you use Captchas on your site, could they be reducing your form completion rates? How might this be influencing your business/website goals? Could you be losing sales or potential leads?

Take the time to really consider whether you need to make use of Captchas – I personally can’t stand them and I’m sure others feel the same way.