Making the browser extension more user friendly

samjmckenzie

Hello,

I'm trying to teach my mother how to use 1Password properly but there are some inconveniences that make it difficult to do so.

For some context, my mother doesn't have all of her accounts in 1Password, so a lot of the time she will try to change her password on a website that isn't in her vault. The extension will then ask if she wants to create a new login with the generated password, which is good. The problem is that this login doesn't have her email in the autofill form, which means she has to edit the login item manually after she's saved the new changed password.

I think this could be fixed by making it clear to the user that some information is missing in the form. So when you change password in a form without an email on a website that you don't have a login for in 1Password, the popup window for saving a new login item will clearly state that an email is missing for the login and give the user the option to use a set default in that case.

I think something like this would be a great addition to the extension and make it easier for everyone to use.

littlebobbytables

Hello @samjmckenzie,

So there is one thing that surprises me a little and I wonder if you can help me understand. Typically to reach the change password form you will need to be signed in. Is 1Password not offering to save when signing into an account it doesn't know about? If a Login item is created at this point it would contain not just the email address but also an understanding of what the sign-in page looks like, potentially even a direct URL that would allow open-and-fill. I'm certainly open to the possibility that there are scenarios we've not considered but one of the workflows that we hope is common goes something like:

1. A user new to 1Password visits a site for which they already have an account.
2. 1Password prompts to save a new Login item the first time they sign in.
3. 1Password can successfully fill and allow the user to sign in using the new Login item.
4. Once the user is ready to start hardening their passwords that 1Password will prompt to update an existing Login item when it recognises a change password form is being submitted.

Saving a new Login item on a change password form would mean not just the likelihood of the username, which may or may not be the email address (very site dependent) but the URL stored in the website field would not be useable for open-and-fill. That doesn't mean we can't consider the possibility of a default username but I can also consider scenarios where a default username wouldn't be useful so its a decision I feel that would benefit from some discussion.

gordcook

@littlebobbytables, I was in a similar situation to @samjmckenzie last weekend, trying to get my mother-in-law set up in 1Password. She had a book with a lot of logins and passwords in it. However, many of them did not work for unknown reasons. And, in the case of a forgotten/lost/unreadable password, logging in first is not an option.

So the workflow in those cases typically went along the lines of:
1. Click "forgot password"
2. Enter e-mail address and click send
3. Click link in e-mail message to get to special change login page with only password fields on it because the the link already contained enough information for the website to infer the user ID.
4. Use suggested password
5. Save new login (with no username because no username field on the form)
6. Use the new login item to copy the password so that it can be pasted/typed into the second field, and click "change password"
7. Go into 1Password, edit the login item, and add the username.
8. If necessary, logout.
9. Login again to make sure everything autofills correctly after being manually modified.

For non-technical people, that workflow can be overwhelming and I'm glad I was beside her to walk her through it.

samjmckenzie

@littlebobbytables Thanks for the response.

You're right that with in an ideal workflow, 1Password will have already have a Login item saved because you it asks the user if it wants to save a new Login when logging in to a new website. However, in this case, the user either

1. didn't save a new Login for some reason when logging in (probably forgot)
2. or more likely was already logged in to the website when they installed 1Password

I know that this probably isn't a very popular workflow and that most 1Password users are tech-savvy enough to just fix it manually, but I still wouldn't exactly call it an edge case. Surely there are other workflows as well in which there isn't a Login item saved already. I reckon it would make a pretty big difference for less tech-savvy people trying to get started with 1Password if this workflow was taken into account.

Slightly off topic, but sometimes when I change password on a website, the default option is to "Save New Login" instead of "Update Saved Login". Do you know why this is?

This is the popup window I'm talking about:

@gordcook Nice to hear someone else with the same experience. I'm hoping we can do something about it.

ag_michaelc

@gordcook, @samjmckenzie, thank you for those use cases you've provided. It's certainly something worth thinking about as we continue to iterate and improve 1Password as a whole and 1Password X in particular. :+1:

@samjmckenzie, when you mention

Slightly off topic, but sometimes when I change password on a website, the default option is to "Save New Login" instead of "Update Saved Login". Do you know why this is?

it's likely we don't have enough confidence to know that we want to update a saved Login by default; maybe the URL is a bit different, for example. It could also just depend on the site itself. Have you noticed it offering one way or another consistently on any particular sites? It might just be that we need to make things "smarter" on some sites, so it'd be great for me to try things out on my end! :smile: