Captcha was a necessary invention to prevent spam bots from auto filling out your forms. Spam bots are computers that pretend to be human, fill out your online forms, and submit it, resulting in hours of your time removing unwanted emails, etc. What happens when your captcha sucks, and you don’t even know it?
Today I navigated to a popular website and went to use one of their services. They had a form of captcha on their form, which is cool. What was not cool is that, even though I am 99.9% sure that I had filled out the correct information 77 times; it always gave me the error, “wrong captcha”.
After getting angry at this I went to their contact form, typed in my message that their captcha sucked and was unusable, however, they have the same captcha on their contact form. Therefore, I could not submit my message and provide feedback that would help them make their website more user friendly.
This is when captcha will actually hurt you.
Your captcha system has to be strong enough to stop bots, but clear enough to allow genuine customers to reach you; otherwise, you are just hurting yourself.
One of the best ways to check this is to get some outside help to test your systems and provide feedback. Sure, you can understand your system, but can your everyday users?
Do you need help with setting up captcha on your website, or are you wondering if it is actually working correctly? Contact me.
