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I am in the process of redesigning the UX of a website for the mobile and tablet users.

Do users generally notice or not notice that when entering a username in a login prompt, an iphone capitalizes the first letter? Should sites allow for case-insensitive usernames now because of this? It seems like a huge pain in the butt for a user...

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    As far as I know most usernames are case insensitive already.
    – DasBeasto
    May 19, 2016 at 13:31

2 Answers 2

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Yes. It is a pain and iOS is doing it wrong. You should never impose your rules on user. They won't like you and this is the fact that most Android user hate iOS.

Sites should definitely allow case sensitive usernames, but you should never assume that all users will have their first character capital.

Edit:

Here's a good workaround to avoid that - it's HTML solution:

How do you turn off auto-capitalisation in HTML form fields in iOS?

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  • Do you mean sites should validate usernames in a case sensitive way (same as passwords)? or by allow case sensitive do you just mean allow users to use whatever case they want but not validate based on case on login?
    – DasBeasto
    May 19, 2016 at 14:11
  • Occasionally, imposing rules that don't actively harm the user experience at the point of entry can improve the quality of data received and which can then be used to improve the user experience at a service level.
    – Roux Martin
    May 19, 2016 at 15:26
  • @DasBeasto The first - same as password
    – Dipak
    May 19, 2016 at 15:47
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    @AndrewMartin I agree with you, but I being iPhone user I personally hate it when the keypad becomes capital the moment I focus on username field. Experiments are good with less sensitive content/module but it should not be done with as sensitive as login fields.
    – Dipak
    May 19, 2016 at 15:52
  • @Name okay, I was just curious why you'd recommend that(not saying it's wrong) because most sites (Google, Facebook, BB&T, Capital One, etc.) don't check the case of usernames only passwords
    – DasBeasto
    May 19, 2016 at 16:04
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It's not capitalizing form fields but automatically running sentence case.

If you break text with a '.' or start a piece of text in a new field it will automatically capitalize the next letter as it guesses that you've ended one sentence and started the next.

In cases where you don't leave a space after the '.' it assumes you're typing a web address and does not capitalize the next letter.

Quite a few systems behave this way and it's well accepted by users as it generally saves them from having to break their train of through while they hit the 'shift' key.

However, implementation is key here. As has been mentioned in "Name"'s answer, there are ways to turn this on and off using HTML - HTML5 has specific field types that can trigger different keyboards in mobile devices. Lazy developers sometimes just use a standard text field and, therefore, automatic sentence casing is turned on for those fields.

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    +1 for "implementation is key". It depends very much on intended use of field if and which type of auto-capitalization makes sense. If you care about capitalization, you should specify it and build accordingly, and you will get the capitals you need.
    – wintvelt
    May 19, 2016 at 15:23
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    That means it's a bug. They are treating the username field (input text field) as a Paragraph.
    – Dipak
    May 19, 2016 at 15:53
  • Sort of - It means the developers didn't use the correct text field.
    – Roux Martin
    May 19, 2016 at 15:58
  • Id argue that IOS shouldn't do this sentence case in any fields, perhaps other than a text area.
    – GWR
    May 19, 2016 at 16:30
  • Again, that's down to implementation. The feature is available in iOS and switched on as default. It's up to developers to choose when to use it or turn it off.
    – Roux Martin
    May 19, 2016 at 19:26

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