Customize MFA screen for SMS Authentication

As you can see in the image, the screen that is thrown to the user to prompt for SMS (as their MFA) has the cursor in the text box that says “Enter Code”. The button to the right says “Send Code”.

As an end user who is used to receiving text messages as MFA in other sites, my default response is to wait for a text to come. And, Okta would NOT send a text because it is waiting for me to click on “Send Code” button first. A few minutes later, I either abandon my login attempt or click on the “SEND CODE” button, which will then trigger a message.

This User experience is very misleading as the default expected action is for Okta to trigger a message when this screen is reached.
Two questions

  1. How can I make Okta trigger an SMS automatically when I reach this screen, instead of asking me to click on the SEND CODE button
  2. If Okta can’t trigger the automatic message, what flexibility do I have to make this a multi step process similar to this
  3. If I can’t make it a multi-step process, am I able to customize the layout of the screen so that the SEND CODE option appears first, instead of prompting the user to enter the code…

Thank you

  1. Found an old forum post about it, there’s a feature request for it at https://ideas.okta.com/app/#/case/105778

https://support.okta.com/help/s/question/0D51Y000096PMFMSA4/send-code-button-in-the-sms-mfa-use-caseflow

Don’t really know about 2 and 3.

Not sure if this would help but you could modify the labels based on the value from:

Another option is to use Okta Verify which has the autoPush function.
https://support.okta.com/help/s/article/How-to-send-Push-Notification-for-MFA-on-users-phones-automatically

We raised this same issue with our relationship team. We didn’t get very far but were able to accomplish this with a bit of a javascript hack. On loading of this screen, we add a click event onto that button so that when the user arrived at that screen the send code button was clicked when it appeared the first time.

This resolved the issue. I should add this was for a widget that we hosted. We will be looking to go to the okta hosted widget and completing the same action there in the near future.

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