I visited Ustream’s website and needed to update my password. The form they offered to do so indicated that what I entered wouldn’t work. The error it gave me said I used an illegal character, but they didn’t indicate what character was the issue. I’m left to guess what character is problematic. Why not tell me? Why set my expectation that I was entering a valid password (“Password strength: high”) next to the form field only to find out that it wouldn’t work?
A better site experience would work like this: as I’m typing, the site tells me an issue exists with provides me helpful text showing me what the problem is and how to solve it.
The best site experience would work like this: let me use whatever characters I want as part of my password sidestepping any problems at all.