How Helpful is Colour-Cueing of PIN Entry?
This addresses the problem of memory limitations in PIN recall for general users, but the results are incremental as they show no benefit from the intervention.
The study investigated whether adding color cues to PIN pads improves PIN recall, but found no significant improvement compared to grey PIN pads despite expectations.
21st Century citizens are faced with the need to remember numbers of PINs (Personal Identification Numbers) in order to do their daily business, and they often have difficulties due to human memory limitations. One way of helping them could be by providing cues during the PIN entry process. The provision of cues that would only be helpful to the PIN owner is challenging because the cue should only make sense to the legitimate user, and not to a random observer. In this paper we report on an empirical study where we added colour to the PINpad to provide an implicit memory cue to PINpad users. We compared the impact of colour PINpads as opposed to grey ones. As expected, the ability to recall a PIN deteriorated significantly over time irrespective of the type of PINpad used. However, there was ultimately no improvement in the ability to recall PINs when using colour PINpads.