Do the 1Password developers want to know when Identities occasionally falls short?

Nearly of the time, Identities does a great job filling in details from one of my four identities. But occasionally, it will leave a field empty. For example, Identities just filled in my First Name and Last Name but left the Email field empty on a simple "take action" form.

Does the 1Password team want to know when Identities (or Credit Cards) occasionally falls short? If so, should I post the details in this forum or send a private email?

-- Ward


1Password Version: 6.1
Extension Version: 4.5.3
OS Version: OS X 10.10.5
Sync Type: Dropbox

Comments

  • jxpx777
    jxpx777
    1Password Alumni

    @Ward We definitely want to know where we can improve 1Password's form filling. If it's a URL you're comfortable sharing publicly, you can post it here. If you'd rather share it privately, you can email a link to this forum thread and your forum username to support@agilebits.com

  • Ward
    Ward
    Community Member

    @jxpx777 Identities doesn't fill in my email address on this Media Matters form.

  • Ward
    Ward
    Community Member

    @jxpx777 Identities doesn't fill in my email address on this Media Matters form.

  • jxpx777
    jxpx777
    1Password Alumni

    @Ward Apologies for the late reply. Our forum software was still indicating I was the last one to reply… :( As for the identity filling here, the email address filled for me in the newsletter email field at the top of the screen and not in the "Will you sign?" box on the right of the screen. Does that match your experience?

  • Ward
    Ward
    Community Member

    @jxpx777 When I encountered the Media Matters form, I was focused on just the "Will you sign?" form. Identities fills in my First & Last Name but leaves the Email field empty. Revisiting the page, I now see Identities fills in my email address in the smaller "SIGN UP FOR UPDATES" field near the top of the page.

    Some pages have multiple forms, e.g., a short one for registered users and a longer one for registering as a new user. I haven't paid attention to how 1Password handles pages with multiple forms. Do Logins, Credit Cards, Identities, etc. attempt to fill in all matching fields on a page, or does 1Password fill in just the first occurrence of each matching field value? The latter seems to be the case for the Media Matters page.

    BTW, I don't know why my March 25 comment appears twice. Since it's been there for more than an hour, I can't delete the extra one.

  • jxpx777
    jxpx777
    1Password Alumni
    edited April 2016

    Hi, @Ward. The process of filling is less digital than you might expect. The decisions the brain makes operate in a grey area of fuzzy decisions based on best guesses rather than certainty in most situations. Multiple fields on the page may be a candidate for a given value in a 1Password item, but we only want to fill each bit of information into exactly one field. Otherwise, we may end up in collisions where, for instance, you're filling an identity and both the email address and the street address are laying claim to some <input type="text"> field.

    The reasonable answer to this would be to only fill within the particular <form> element that you identify as being most relevant. This would be lovely if all websites were coded using good semantics. But in our experience, we have seen pages where…

    • There is no <form> element at all (like the contest page we discussed in the other thread)
    • There are nice distinct <form>s with good semantics
    • The entire page with what a human would describe as separate forms based on the visual appearance is wrapped in a single <form> element
    • Each field of what would appear visually as the form is wrapped in a separate <form> element.

    In order to support these various approaches, we decided a while ago to give less importance to the <form> element itself. Sometimes this means we fill things incorrectly like in this case. That doesn't mean we're satisfied with that by a long shot. Our users expect that we will support each of these kinds of sites and do so well. It's a big responsibility, but we take these expectations as a huge vote of confidence. And it's a challenge that I personally look forward to tackling every day. Please keep the reports coming. It's passionate users like you that help us drive 1Password forward every day.

    P.S. No worries about the duplicate post. It's probably just a gremlin playing about in our forum software somewhere. :)

This discussion has been closed.