This weekend I played around with my Mint account and part of the setup included me tying in my 401k program which is managed by Paychex. Mint just couldn’t connect to Paychex so I decided to visit the site to find out what’s the deal.

I was greeted by this atrocity.

I partly want to commend the designers for trying something new, but this isn’t the site to try that on. The audience here isn’t likely to be tech savvy or frequent visitors; two criteria I would look for when trying out a new interface direction.

Users are familiar with entering a username and password but an image is pushing it. 6 hours after selecting my image I came back to the site to write this post and I forgot my image already. Who has a favorite image? My question to Paychex; why not just use a CAPTCHA here? They are becoming widely used and more and more people are becoming familiar with them.

Here’s a suggestion. Use reCAPTCHA if you don’t want to create this yourselves, but please get rid of this image option for “added security.” While you are at it, make the whole UI of the benefits section more usable.