Best Practices For Prototypes

Username is the person's email address.

Passwords are nine lowercase letters and numbers.

We never show a password; instead, we show *********
We require 9 characters because there are hackers who have automatic attacks on passwords that are 8 characters or less
People are confused by upper/lower case so we use only lowercase.
People are confused by zero/letter-O, one/letter-L, and the letter q, so we omit these.
We choose this as the best tradeoff between usability and complexity for typical applications.
For applications that need stronger security, we provide stronger solutions.

Some web sites use wording like this: Login, Logout, Join
We recommend this wording: Sign In, Sign Out, Sign Up
We've found this is easier for people to understand, more upbeat, and more consistent.

We start with a typical layout.

For most websites, we begin with IconExperience Windows style.

For freeware applications, we begin with freeware Silk icons that are small size only

For desktop applications, we begin with Tango desktop icons

Technical Implementation

We use these approaches:

To make our websites load faster and more efficiently,
we may link to Google's caches of major javascripts: