A post called Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. has been doing the rounds over the last few days, making it pretty high on Hacker News, and I've had it sent to me many times with an 'is this true?' kind of vibe. It's written for

Blink: Intent to Ship: HTML install element

YouTube video by Kevin Powell

## Let us offer you a way to find it ### (Or, a small UX improvement on this website) I came across Joe Allen’s Smaply blog post, Journey mapping beyond the happy path: designing for edge cases, breakdowns, and recovery earlier today. It’s an excellent post, and you should read it. Here, a request for the mangled path /the%20point%20of%20the/doing-is/the%20doing/not%20what-gets/done has been transformed into a search for the point of the doing is the doing not what gets done. Coincidentally, I’ve been drafting a post here, provisionally titled “Look for the workarounds”. It covers the same topics; if you want to fix a service, you first need to figure out where it’s broken, cracked, creaking , leaking, or blocked. Face it. You’re a plumber. I was thinking mostly of internal, back-office users. Joe’s article focuses more on how to identify problems-to-solve on the front end. The tells are different … if, during research, an internal user says “Excel”, prick your ears up. Every workaround involves Excel. I’ll try to publish that in the next week or so. Joe’s post goes into great and useful detail on the frontend side of things, so go read that instead if you’re more interested in that side of things. Instead, I offer you an anecdote. ## The most useful UX improvement I ever suggested Around 10-15 years ago, when I was working on the Scottish Enterprise website, I noticed that the abandonment (bounce) rate from our 404 page was high. Very high. Can’t remember exactly what, but north of 85%. So we ran an experiment: can we reduce the bounce rate on our 404 page? Originally, we had designed a sliding scale of “Oor Wullie” themed errors, which went: * 404: Jings! * 403: Crivvens! * 5xxx: Help ma boab! We even had agreement from DC Thomson to use their images. Sadly, senior management at the time weren’t keen (despite very positive user feedback) so we ended up with fairly generic “Page not found” or “Forbidden” messages. So our 404 page just said “Page not found” with a link to the home page or the option to try a search. Analytics showed that nobody was using the link, or the search. Why would they? We were asking them to either: * Navigate our information architecture, right from the home page, to try to find the page they want, click-by-click; or * Re-type a search query they had literally just typed into a search engine only to find a broken link Unsurprisingly, hardly anybody did these things. They just hit the back button. So, I had an idea. What if, instead of just some text saying “Oops, we couldn’t find that page” (or whatever) and a link to the home page, we took the page path, sanitised it and inverted it then ran a search for that and displayed the results. So for example, if you got a 404 for `/business-growth/grants/grants-for-small-businesses.aspx `we turned that into a search for `grants for small businesses grants business growth`, then returned the results. We got users back on the right track effortlessly. Bounce rate more than halved. ## A small victory After a conversation at work today, I thought I’d have a go at recreating this here. ~~I haven’t had time yet to write the code to actually execute the search, but, if you ever arrive at this site via a broken link, or a typo in a URL, you should see something like this.~~ ~~I’m not sure yet about placing focus on the search input, as it may be jarring for assistive technologies.~~ ~~For now, just hit the search button.~~ [Edit: the code now executes and returns search results automatically.] Try it. Hit this link: /this-link%20/is-broken David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien __What’s in a name? * David O'Brien __Why people use subtitles and captioning * David O'Brien __How to create a user story map with a Miro table * David O'Brien __Would you hire Sam? ## Possibly related * A new life in the unknown * Invisible Disabilities * Accessibility - Sharing knowledge between organisations * How to create accessible Word documents

If your business runs on Airtable or worse, if your business IS Airtable, you need to make your own exit plan

Kevin Powell tries out Prop For That , makin it look so slick and easy Watch on YouTube

Scripts to gather information for including in version history comments and to make using source control a bit simpler for non-technical projects. - cmdln/flashbake

Gecko: Intent to Ship: Advanced CSS attr() function.

Blink: Intent to Prototype: <input type="checkbox" switch>

Gecko: Intent to prototype: margin-trim