I've recently started using BackBlaze as my backup service and I noticed something interesting on their restore sign-in page. The password input is slightly longer than their email input.
Since this is their sign-in page and not their registration, I'm sure it doesn't have too much of an impact on determining a user's password length.
However, I contacted them about this and this was their response:
Looks like some goofy HTML to me! I just tried it a few places:
- Safari Mac – normally equal sized boxes
- Chrome Mac – same
- Firefox Mac – Email field is longer
- Firefox Windows – Password field is longer
Strange! I'll have to send it off to our designer. Thanks for the heads up. I'm curious if it would have some kind of effect on user passwords though as well!
So although it wasn't on purpose as I originally thought, it got me wondering: Does the size of an input matter beyond just its style? For example, Twitter's bootstrap input classes (mini, small, medium, large etc) if I were to use small for a new registration password instead of large or use large for an amount in a donation form instead of mini, can I help influence the user's input?