Firefox Password Doorhanger

Surgical intervention to improve passwords for everyone

Like many password managers in 2015, Firefox behaved as if it was infallible, always assuming that it was saving the correct usernames and passwords. In reality, websites do not cooperate with browsers, and users need to review and often correct the credentials that are being saved. I redesigned the doorhanger interface to foster good password hygiene and increase trust in Firefox.

My Role

Senior Product Designer

Teammates

Firefox Desktop Engineer

Challenges

Sensitive data
User testing is constrained

New team

Methods

Ideation
Presentation

Before

Until 2015, browsers didn’t let you review passwords before saving them

The problem and how it was solved

Websites don’t cooperate with browsers that try to capture the username and password, and oftentimes the wrong password gets saved (e.g. on change password forms) or the username is missing (on multi-step login forms). I observed users struggling with messy credentials and redesigned the doorhanger to let users review and even modify saved passwords. This was especially useful when users were changing passwords, or just updating them in Firefox where the button would change to Update.

After

First version introduced in beta
Early design of the dialog in Firefox from the Photon redesign
The save password dialog in Firefox today

Research Findings

Users were saving passwords, not not trusting Firefox as the true source for their saved passwords.

Chrome soon followed suit, adopting this pattern for their password manager

Impact

Engagement with the feature was increased, which paved the way for major expansion in Firefox’s password management. This pattern was eventually copied by other browsers like Chrome and Edge.