Stupid form design
October 21st, 2004I have noticed more and more, these days, that web forms are demanding that you have to enter your email address twice, the second being a ‘confirmation’ of the first (the latest culprit I’ve seen being the otherwise useful Telephone Preference Service - for more examples see here).
Now…why? Forms that are used to decide a password ask you to enter the password twice, for the simple reason that you can’t see what you’ve typed, and so you have no idea if it is correct; the confirmation step is there to make sure you haven’t got it wrong. Fine. But for an email address, you can see what you’ve typed already! It might not even have its intended effect, as many people will just copy and paste their email address from the previous form field and propogate the error. And if you’re going to demand the poor user type (or copy & paste) their email address twice, why not ask them to confirm their name, phone number, address, etc. while they’re at it?
I don’t know why this annoys me so much. Probably because it’s not so much the inconvenience, more the mind-boggling stupidity that goes behind it.
October 22nd, 2004 at 18:35:36
Hi
I can see your point, but with the email address proving to be slightly more important (normally) form of contact than name or address on a website (confirming details and retrieving password) then the idea behind a double check is in my opinion worthwhile. However, the nature in which it works, as you say, is possibly not so good.
Personally i dont copy and paste on forms but repeating contact details prompts me for previous valid entries anyway.
Surely its a good thing for people who are still slightly slow/crap on computers where a wrong email address may be more frequent. The chances are they would type both fields and mismatches would be picked up.
Sadly all interactive sites rely on lack of user error and each site must decide how much hand holding is needed.
Nice site btw. Never been one for blogs but i like this one.
David