Why do they exist?  You know what I am talking about.  When at Panera or Starbucks and the icon at the top of your phone screen shows wifi connection but you can’t, for the life of you, load the Facebook app.  You have every reason to believe you’re connected but you’re not.

That’s a captive portal at work.  It’s great that Starbucks, McDonalds, and your dentist’s office offer free wifi.  But it should never be at the cost of usability.  Connecting to a wifi network should simply happen.  This is 2016.  At the most, a user should only have to navigate to Settings>Wifi, click a preferred network to connect, and enter a password.  At. the. most.

What would be even better?  Simply clicking on the network name in Settings>Wifi and ‘Shazam!’ you are connected.  And next time you’re at that location,  you shouldn’t even have to do that.  Your SMARTphone should pick it up and link to the wifi network you connected to the previous time.

The solution?  GET RID OF THESE PORTALS!  And yes, I understand there are seemingly important reasons portals are utilized.  There are security, privacy, and other concerns to address.  But from my experience, the terrible user experience portals incur and resulting user-directed hatred toward the implementer is not worth whatever justifications are made.  My recommendation to businesses is to implement security via a password-protected network.

Let’s make it easier for people to connect.