Nobody ever complained about the length before today

Tried signing up for an account with a fancy new app an earnest entrepreneur really wants me to try out.

The app can ask one of two secret questions for account recovery.

“Which school did you attend?”
“What is your pet’s name?”

Normal stuff.

I tried the school option.

Except… I went to a Welsh school in Wales.

With a Welsh name.

Which the form rejects because it isn’t an “English” word.

Okay… It’s a v1.0 of the app. We can forgive it for now.

Let’s use my pet’s name instead.

Which the form rejects, because my pet’s name must be between 6 and 32 characters in length.

This is a valuable teaching moment.

Your iPhone app with no traction doesn’t get to dictate to me how long my pet’s name is.

And the iPhone app got closed and deleted right in front of the entrepreneur.

“Bad user experience. I think you need to work on that.”

I think he will be informing his development team to create two new Jira tickets before the day is out.

You get one, very slim chance to hold on to your new user. Don’t waste it with arbitrary rules.