The American astronauts were rumored to be using a special Space Pen, which was developed specifically to work in zero-gravity conditions. It used a pressurized ink cartridge, enabling it to write upside down (Seinfeld fans should smile by now) and, of course, be used in space. It is believed that NASA spent a total amount of $11 million dollars to develop that pen.
The Russians gave their Cosmonauts a pencil.
Whether this story is accurate or not, it brings out a common product development truth – all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. Hence the abbreviation K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Stupid! And reCAPTCHA certainly did achieve a simple solution to several problems at once.
reCAPTCHA is a special captcha form component for identifying humans and rejecting spam and bots. It is done through the traditional means of displaying distorted words for the users to type and verify. However, instead of generating a random word, reCAPTCHA displays words that were scanned from real text books, thus helping in the global effort of digitizing old texts.
I ran into reCAPTCHA a few months ago and was impressed by the concept of “recycling” human actions – taking something we do so commonly, almost without thinking, like verifying our humanity with forms through captchas, and harnessing it to both combat evil (spam and bots) and do good (digitize texts).
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Value
Let’s take a second to ponder over a very disturbing fact: if we didn’t have spam or bots that were driving our websites off the wall – we wouldn’t have had reCAPTCHA, and as a result, many textbooks wouldn’t have been digitized as part of a universal effort.
When thinking of it that way, reCAPTCHA’s value starts to get a whole new meaning. It becomes very much like modern medicine – it wouldn’t have been discovered had we not gotten ill; I suppose we owe plenty of our discoveries to urgent needs or even accidents, such as the genome project, antibiotics, Champagne, and so forth. It’s strange to vocalize it, but many people around the world will be exposed to important texts digitally thanks to the plague called spam and bots.
That being said, lets examine reCAPTCHA’s value in two aspects: intrinsic value and global contribution.
Intrinsic value
reCAPTCHA has a very granular offering – it provides your product with a solution to something you’ll probably need as part of your registration form, or any other form that requires user authentication. You need to sort out the humans from the bots that attack your site.
Your R&D will most likely tell you that developing such a component is very simple, and there are plenty of open-source solutions out there that you can use. And they’ll be right to say so. Basically, all you need is a tiny utility that generates a random word, and displays it in a funny way. You can add colored squiggly lines if you’re overly creative. And that’s about that.
But reCAPTCHA’s solution has two main advantages:
- It’s off the shelf. You just cut and paste a little piece of code, and you get all of the intrinsic functionality already contained within it; also, the processing is done on the reCAPTCHA servers, which might free your own servers slightly, but on the other hand relies on a server-farm that is out of your control latency-wise. However, if Twitter and Facebook use it, then I guess it’s all right.
- It’s fully loaded. Two paragraphs ago, it sounded quite simple to make a workable captcha. However, to make it right, you need to consider people who might not be able to read your distorted image. Sometimes, the text is illegible, and needs to be changed. Again – implementing something like this is not like inventing the space pen, but why bother when this elegant component already exists?
(I’m not sure my dad would be able to read this one…)
Global contribution
I love recycling; not only in my trash habits at home, but also as a goal to live a greener life. Don’t worry – I don’t spend my spare time hugging trees, but I definitely believe that there’s a practical approach to recycling, which can ultimately be applied to business.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” according to Thomas J. Watson Sr., formerly the president of IBM. I’m afraid Mr. Watson may have missed the mark slightly. Our collective processing power today is gargantuan, and some applications make use of it very effectively.
File sharing, legal or not, is a perfect example for recycling processing power, as well as the wonderful SETI@Home project at Berkeley, which is currently the largest distributed computing effort around the world, utilizing over 3 million computers worldwide in order to analyze data from radio telescopes in search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. reCAPTCHA goes along those lines, but instead of recycling wasted processing time, they’re recycling wasted human effort.
Call me an idealist, but as a product junkie I think that part of making the world a better place revolves around reducing waste and channeling effort. Most of us share their hosing with others, use platforms developed by the online community, incorporate maps drawn by other companies, and make it an effort to make sure we reduce our costs and increase the productivity of our company.
With reCAPTCHA we have a double benefit – we get a ready-to-use component, and join a world effort to bring knowledge to the masses. That alone is a value in itself.
Value summary: Provides an off-the-shelf component that answers a specific requirement, while helping in a global effort to digitize texts.
Usability
One thing to consider when creating such a generic and simple component is not to overdo it. I’m sure product development people would have loved to sink their teeth into this product and design their heart out with plenty of cool features, like changing the image size, making it full-screen, creating a hovering magnify-glass to make the letters bigger, etc. But that would have turned this component into a monster.
When dealing with a component so basic in its functionality, the product developer needs to constantly take a step back and look at the big picture. It’s terribly easy to look at your product under the microscope and be so caught up with its tiny world – I’m sure many of us have been there and realized our overzealousness.
One has to remember that this type of granular component lives inside the context of a foreign web page, which contains a form in it. It’s mostly the last, and least favorite, field the user needs to fill in. So it’s better to keep it as simple and as non-intrusive as possible. We’ve already agreed that forms are a pain – let’s not make them any worse.
reCAPTCHA managed to keep it simple. That’s their first great achievement.
Other than that – the usability is quite basic; after all, this is merely a form field. You can change the text with a new set of words, in case the image that’s presented to you is too hard to read, or you can change the text into an audio challenge taken from an old time radio show (therefore also transcribing old recorded shows).
That’s it; in terms of usability, the product fits the requirements.
Usability summary: Simple and complete.
Layout and design
Once again – such a simple widget doesn’t have much room for an elaborate layout and design schemes. However, one thing that I would like to see is customizable display: my website and forms are usually of a specific design, and I would have liked to make this field look and feel as a native field to my site. I have no problem with sharing credit or double branding, but reCAPTCHA’s choice of Bordeaux colors does not necessarily fit my overall website design.
Layout and design summary: Simple, though cannot be customized.
Under the hood
When I initially heard of reCAPTCHA, the first question that popped into my mind was “how does it work?” If the words that are shown to me are the ones that are used to digitize book, then how does the captcha verify my input as correct? Or else – if the captcha engine already knows the meaning of the word, then what part am I playing here exactly?
And here is where reCAPTCHA came up with the pencil solution.
After the texts are scanned, they go through an OCR process to interpret it. However, OCR is never perfect, and many words remain unresolved. Yet the OCR mechanism is clever enough to at least indicate which words were not interpreted correctly.
So reCAPTCHA came up with a very simple, yet ingenious solution: each user is presented with two words, not one. One word is a word that was successfully acquired by the OCR, while the other one was not. After typing these words, reCAPTCHA verifies the known word with your input; if the match is correct, it assumes that the second, unknown word is also correct.
This user-interpreted word is then given to a few other users for recapturing, and then, after cross verification, the word is declared as properly interpreted.
Why was I so impressed? Because, as a former engineer, I would definitely have overcomplicated something this simple. Can’t help but to doff your cap – well done!
Bottom line
When creating your online forms, it is great to be able to take part in a worldwide effort, and harness the power of the masses to a global endeavor. When your website joins the ranks of websites like Facebook, TicketMaster, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Craigslist, who already use reCAPTCHA, you know that you’re with good company.
Forms are a pain.