Worst. idea. ever. I hate this on Twitter, it breaks the password manager and it is an additional click just to show a login. How is it so intrusive to have 2 fields on a page?
Javascript, password managers & regression aside, the thought process behind the article makes sense. What sent up red flags is the only evidence for this UX is anecdotal: "twitter uses so it must be good."<p>When developing UX methods, you must test the fuck out of them. I wish the article had some numbers to back up their "we removed two boxes" illustrations.
from day-one (Oct 2008), I designed the login form on <a href="http://costpad.com" rel="nofollow">http://costpad.com</a> to be<p><pre><code> - embedded in every page so the user logs in whenever he/she wants
- always shown so a single click starts the process
- keyboard-friendly by using Tab to navigate to the input boxes
- Javascript-less friendly, so to be able to log in without JS
and not having to "bypass" my beloved NoScript
- big-styled (as the rest of the webapp) so to be tablet/finger friendly.
</code></pre>
Yes, this implementation occupies quite a lot of space up there, but I think the trade-off is fine.<p>The popup/dropdown login form is certainly cool and space-saving, but I couldn't come up with an implementation that satisfies me...
How does popping up a new set of elements but merely on the same page entirely remove the "visual processing" step? You still have to look and work out how the form works, much the same as if it were on a new page.
I have one complaint with the Twitter login dropdown, when you miss the arrow it loads the login page. That's fixed here but it doesn't work without JS. You should probably fix that.