ios - iPhone - Password Forgotten - popup dialog or modal?

I have been struggling a little with this problem. I'll start introducing my case so to better explain my concerns.

The scenario I'm dealing with is that of a password forgotten feature: I have a sign-in view, with text fields for username and password and a submit button (plus other things). Now I'm going to add a "password forgotten?" functionality that will ask the user the email to than send a reset link to it.

There are few alternatives to follow once the user click on password forgotten, :

• to show a modal view with the email field and the submit button (and a brief description). Minus: it's going to be an almost empty view.


• to show the email text field dynamically in the sign-in view + the submit button. Minus: I have to think through a design solution for that, and may not be trivial. Like: where to show it? Should I hide the other fields and buttons? etc.


• A popup dialog with a text field and a submit button shows up. Minus: ?

To me the last solution sounds like the straghtest, but I don't have a concrete explanation for that, it's just common sense.

What's your point of you? Is it worth to use a popup input dialog in this scenario?

Answer

Forgotten password can be considered the corner case. So you want to optimize your interface for the main case. That's good. But in case somebody needs to reset his password you don't want to squeeze this into a modal dialog. The user is lost so let him focus entirely on the password reset task by removing everything that could distract him. So the point you list as 'minus' is actually a 'plus' for this solution.

I have a very simple sketch below and you might want to think about the links as better touchable elements (like buttons).

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}