On June 23rd, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox made a case against password masking. Password masking is that funny text field that turns what you type into stars or dots.

This is password masking in our very own iqcontent.com

Nielsen dismissed the “looking over shoulders” threat, and explained how password masking undermines usability by breaking one of its basic principles: provide feedback and show the system’s status.

Security expert Bruce Schneier agreed with Nielsen on June 26th, just to retract on July 3rd. But the interesting part of Schneier’s retraction is not the retraction itself. It’s this paragraph in it:

A reader mentioned BlackBerry’s solution, which is to display each character briefly before masking it; that seems like an excellent compromise.

This solution is not exclusive to Blackberry: Nokia S60 phones and the iPhone also use this delayed masking technique. And I am sure it’s also present in other mobile platforms.

This is delayed password masking in my iPhone 3G.

Ta da! A mobile design pattern

You could say that delayed masking has become a design pattern for mobile devices. And so, Schneier’s retraction becomes the first mobile design pattern suggested for desktop interfaces I’ve ever seen.

El hambre agudiza el ingenio | Hunger sparks wit

Mobile is a challenging environment for interaction designers. Input in mobile is an expensive operation: typing is difficult in a 12-key numeric keypad. That’s why usability problems that may not be critical in desktop interfaces become much more acute in mobile environments. Password mistyping is a clear example: it is a problem for desktop users, but it is a terrible problem for mobile users.

This severity pushes mobile designers to come up with smarter and more efficient solutions, like delayed password masking. And those solutions that make mobile users’ lives easier, might also help desktop users.

Another mobile-necessity based innovation

One-click input clearance is another mobile trend. This is applied to search fields in mobile-optimised websites. Search queries are usually sticky (to save typing in query refinement). But this stickiness makes deleting the search query a cumbersome process:

• First, you need to click on the search field, and hope the cursor will automatically appear at the end of your query.
• Then you must press the delete key repeatedly.

In the case of my search for “Carroll” in Amazon, I will need to press the delete key 7 times.

That’s eight actions required to delete my initial search query. It’s not too bad if you searched for something short like “Carroll”, but becomes a nightmare if you searched for ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’.

The input clearance solution

Google has come up with a neat solution to this problem, the one-click input clearance. In the Google mobile site I can easily delete my search queries by clicking once in the x icon at the end of the search box.

Mobile provides lessons for desktop

Deleting input is not such big a deal in desktop computers: we can use the mouse to click, drag to select the text and hit the delete key once. That’s three actions (click, drag, delete) to erase input. Still, one action is better than three. One-click input clearance is another mobile design technique that could improve desktop user experience, just like the delayed masking technique.

I see more of this happening in the future: the migration from mobile to desktop and the subsequent improvement in desktop usability. Do you have more examples of this phenomenon? Share them!