Bad usability: Halfords website search

I needed some oil and decided to go to Halfords website and see how much it cost. I typed "10W30" into the search facility and the website searched for "power". As you can see from the image below, this search returned 197 results - not one of which had any relevance to what I was looking for. 

Ironically the oil I wanted does exist on their website but you can’t search for it unless you know to add the word "oil" into the search term. Even then, their website search results seem to prioritise any number of other oils which aren't 10W30 over the one product that is. 

Simon on: Wearable technology

So wearable technology in the form of Google Glass or smartwatches is supposed to be the latest game-changer for the meetings industry. This looks very much like another example of the latest shiny thing being hailed as a breakthrough.

In spite of the hype surrounding the likes of the Galaxy Gear, the watches are little more than repeater stations for smartphones and they need charging every couple of days.

Then there’s Google Glass which appears to provide a connection to email, the Web and other functions by showing, in effect, a heads-up display in the top right corner of the wearer’s field of vision. 

Various voices are already being raised in alarm at the privacy issues the gadget raises by providing users with the ability to record video and take photos using Glass without anybody else knowing.

But the point about all of this is that none of the technology provides a real benefit to the meetings industry. It’s a distraction. It’s probably going to have as much impact as 3D television had on the nation’s viewing habits. 

The good news for meeting planners is that, for now, all those blogs promoting wearable tech can be safely ignored.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: Free Wi-Fi at events

People are still demanding free Wi-Fi at conferences because hotels and coffee shops do it so why not conference venues? Sadly, it’s not as simple as that.

Over recent years the number of Wi-Fi devices being carried by conference attendees has increased significantly. Many now have at least one smartphone plus a tablet computer and probably other kit as well.

The problem is exacerbated by the increasing number of people carrying myfi devices which, as Apple found out years ago, can create havoc on a Wi-Fi network.

The increasing number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices means that, while an organiser of a conference for just a few hundred has a fighting chance of providing reliable free Wi-Fi, those running bigger events have a choice: bring in a specialist or deal with a stream of complaints about poor connectivity.

The problem is that Wi-Fi is not an inexhaustible resource: there are only a few channels available and they can become clogged quickly, meaning that range and capacity of the Wi-Fi access points falls to the level where the service is virtually unusable.

So if you have  more than a few hundred attendees and you want stable, reliable Wi-Fi at your conference, you have to accept reality: you have to pay to provide the service. Don’t assume you can get it free.

Originally published in Conference News

How to choose a good password

As many of you will know, online security is a subject I'm fairly passionate about. So much so that I've been writing a fair bit and also speaking at some events about it all lately.

After looking back through my blog posts I realised that I've not written anything about how to choose a good password and that is the most crucial element in the fight to keep your online accounts safe. So now seems like the perfect time to remedy that and explain the current best practice for passwords.

I specifically say "current" best practice because like most things - the advice can change from time to time and actually has changed over recent years.

The old advice for creating a secure password was to have a random string of upper and lower case letters interspersed with numbers and symbols. Something that didn't look anything like a word you would find in a dictionary and that was at least 12 characters long (and preferably more like 16 characters). Something like this :-

UY8&beY!6alPQ:3s

Although that is a 16 character password, there are a couple of problems it - the biggest of which is that it's incredibly horrible to remember and most people couldn't.

At this point I need to explain that there are ways to measure how good a password is and the best way is something called "entropy" which is basically a measure of the randomness of the characters in a password. You really don't need to understand how that works but we can use that as a comparison for how strong some example passwords are. The 16 character password above has an entropy of 77.7 bits.

Being able to remember a password is obviously a major requirement of passwords - otherwise people will write them down and that means someone else could find out what they are easily.

So instead of the older password advice, there is now some much better password advice which is to select 4 completely random words that are not related to each other and string them together. So for example :-

correcthorsebatterystaple

I've highlighted the individual words so that you can better distinguish them. I don't think anyone would dispute that this password is much easier to remember than the previous example and it is actually more secure as it has 93.6 bits of entropy.

Even so, that's not the best we can do with this password and a couple of very simple tweaks will make it much better. Those tweaks would simply be to capitalise the first letter of each word and to include a bit of punctuation like this :-

Correct!Horse&BatteryStaple?

This password is now still fairly simple to remember but has 140.2 bits of entropy which is approaching twice as secure as the first password I showed.

So, now you know how to create a really secure password and keep your online accounts and data safe but we're not quite finished. The final things we need to consider is that passwords do get lost and not just by you - as the recent eBay hack has proved, even the biggest players on the internet have security problems from time to time and there have been many of these attacks which have revealed passwords.

For that reason, it's REALLY important that you have a different password for each account on the internet. I know that's much easier said than done but there are tools like 1Password.com or LastPass.com which will help deal with that.

The MOST important piece of advice I can give though is no matter what else you do - make sure you have a completely different and secure password for your email account because most websites will allow a password to be reset with an email so if someone can login to your email they can probably login to most of your accounts.