Video: CAPTCHA Done Wrong

When we stumbled upon Netflix’s home page the other day we immediately thought that this would be a good showcase for how not to do your CAPTCHA. Which is exactly what we do in this video:

Netflix violate most of the guidelines Christian presented in a previous post titled CAPTCHA can kill your conversion rate such as:

Make your CAPTCHA ask for real words or sentences instead of using random characters.
Tell your visitors you’ve implemented the CAPTCHA to prevent spam instead of forcing them to fill out meaningless form fields.
Reload just the CAPTCHA if your visitor gets it wrong instead of having him retype all the form fields once more.

Furthermore Netflix ask their visitors to confirm both their email and their password, which is just unnecessary friction: if the email is confirmed, just send the user a new in case he misspelled it.

Do you know any good or bad examples of CAPTCHAs?

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Authored by Baymard Institute

Published on December 13, 2009

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