My friend and colleague of over 20 years, Nick Burka, has written a great article about the Usability for Promotion Codes and Access Codes over on the silverorange blog.

You might not care about promotion codes, but you’ve probably had to type in some kind of code for 2-factor authentication or the rare non-scammy coupon code. Nick’s article covers what can make these codes easy (or difficult) to remember, type, and say over the phone.

It’s too bad the creators of our Canadian postal code system couldn’t have read this before they put all of those Gs and Js in the Quebec postal codes (an English G and French J sound almost identical).

I’m particularly proud of this article as it draws on external expertise – something we’ve been trying to do more of at silverorange. This article in particular draws on things we learned for a literacy and essential skills consultant, and from the non-profit Computers for Success Canada.