Good UX: Digital Ocean 2FA setup
Mon, Oct 10, 2016Created an account on Digital Ocean for the first time today to spin up a VM for some tests.
As part of the initial setup, I enabled 2 Factor Authentication for the Digital Ocean account, and this was the best 2FA setup UX i have seen so far.
The whole workflow is visible at once, making progressing through the setup steps immediate to understand:
- first you enter a mobile number so that 2FA can be reset if the TOTP key is lost
- then you enter the code received via SMS
- the 2FA key is now revealed as a QR code
- once the QR code has been scanned, a first TOTP token needs to be generated and entered, confirming that 2FA is correctly setup
- visual feedback is finally given about the successful completion of the 2FA setup workflow, securing the Digital Ocean account
My only remark here would be that the TOTP key is not displayed as plain text but only when hovering the mouse over the QR code. As i only use a CLI tool to generate TOTP tokens, on a headless system, QR codes are not useful for my workflow; adding a text version of the TOTP key doesn’t seem to be adding much cognitive burden to the workflow, but as long as the plaintext can be reasonably easily be disclosed, the process works for me.