Password Memory Lane

Cut us open and we’re more computer memory than the ordinary human kind, she thinks to herself, working by the glow of her computer screen. We remember our passwords the way our online apps do—recognizing without really knowing them.

That’s definitely true of the randomly-generated password—a string of letters, numbers, and special characters—The Company provided to log into the laptop they mailed her seven years ago. A password no employee can reset; if you forget it or fail to store it securely (like IT strongly urges you to do), The Company generates a new one for you.

It’s one way The Company ensures employees are using passwords that can’t be hacked. She has some sense of what characters make up this password, but only her fingers know the order. She couldn’t tell you the password if her, her mom’s, and her mom’s dog’s (Ruby) life depended on it.

She leans back in her home office chair to get comfortable while browsing through password reset flows other designers have created and posted on Dribbble. The Company has tasked her with designing this flow for the app they’re a few weeks away from launching.

Most designers would look down on such an assignment or write it off as a basic task requiring no imagination. And, of course, that’s why her manager handed this part of the experience off to her—maybe she’d get something done on time for a change and he wouldn’t have to pick up the slack.

She’s always overcomplicating things, trying to ignite philosophical conversations about every error message, every breadcrumb pattern, every drop-down menu. This time, her instructions are simple: No competitive analysis, no explorations, no personas, no dissertation-long explanations for design decisions. Just design the damn thing.

It’s not that she's deliberately ignoring her manager’s instructions by pulling this all-nighter researching account security, auditing competitor designs, and sketching her way to what can only be the best possible password reset flow. She just doesn’t know any other way to work.

She runs on inspiration, has to dig to find some universal truth at the core of our digital interfaces. (Last month, she was asked to make a call on whether buttons in the new design system should have rounded or sharp corners. She put together a 16-page report on why users find rounded corners more trustworthy. Eyeroll. Sigh. Groan. But she was right—users do trust and CLICK buttons with rounded corners.)

There must be something fundamental about passwords and people she needs to understand. She’ll know it when she finds it; she always does.

A sip of coffee. A quick look at the Forgot Password screen for a financial tracking app in intuitiveDesigner’s online portfolio (A little too intimidating, she notes in her Google Doc). This stat from passwordresearch.com: 61% of people use the same password for multiple accounts. Her mind takes off.

Where in the memory do passwords for all our accounts get stored? Just the other day her mom (now in her 70s) was complaining that you need an account to do anything online. Her mom’s not wrong, and working for The Company she knows why this is: The Company wants our data.

As a result, life has become a series of passwords we need to remember to access different parts of ourselves. The Company has ensured we have an app for every part of the human experience. Each time we create a new account, are we locking away parts of ourselves without even thinking?

She thinks about how her mom never seems to remember that she’s signed up for this shopping app, that dog food subscription, 10 different digital coupon sites—logins created almost without her knowledge. Then, when it comes time to use them again, her mom is forced to recover her account and reset the password, using Ruby combined with a special character and number (her mom always forgets the special character and number). For a time, there was a notebook for keeping track of the password changes. It was given up out of frustration and looked like some mad person was obsessed with writing Ruby over and over again.

While she jokes about her mom’s tech illiteracy, she realizes she can’t laugh at this epiphany: There’s something beautiful about wanting to use the name of someone you love to unlock everything The Company can store about you. It’s like her mom is reclaiming something…

Like photos from her life, she looks back on a life of passwords. One upper case letter, numbers 0-9, any of these characters: !*#@$^%, she starts making the rules for setting a password in The Company’s new app. Could Xanga have been the first? MySpace? AIM? What was the first thing she ever logged into? What parts of herself did she think she could password-protect?

There were funny passwords from a time when she fancied herself a wit. She distinctly remembers a password combining her name with that of her middle school crush. She’s even made up passwords based on her interests: GreenGoddessDressing, TheFountainPen, RubyisaYORKIE. To make them easy to remember, but also because…I’m not a robot.

She’s a human. She designs for humans. She protects humans from other humans who try to take advantage of them for being human on the internet. She does this by trying to turn people into computers—to get them to think like computers, write like computers, remember like computers.

More secure passwords, a different one for every account, couldn’t save my identity. She’s almost done, finishing the last screen of the flow. And it’s true: Her identity was stolen, right from under her passwords. Since she’s been working for The Company, she’s been trying to reset everything that makes her computer and human; she’s unlocking herself.

Tomorrow, she’ll show her manager the design for the password reset flow. She designed the damn thing. But she has these rules for creating a password:

• Be human
• Make it memorable