Solving the “Repeat Email Address” Form Issue. Maybe.
Written by Russ on September 9, 2009 – 10:37 pmOne of the mailing lists that I’m on had a question posed today about using “Repeat Email Address” in form validation.
I actually cringed as I typed that just now–that particular part of form validation is pretty annoying (to me, at least). I find it amusing that shift-tab, copy, tab, paste as a method for handling doesn’t cross anyone’s mind when creating these types of “validations” in forms.
There were a number of responses to the thread, but Steve Krug (yeah, that Steve Krug) put out the notion that he suspects most of the email address typos may originate in hasty typing, and they end up getting submitted because the user doesn’t realize that they’ve made a mistake. Krug identifies that it’s possible, from his perspective, that the font used in many forms is fairly small and that makes it so that errors don’t actually jump out at the users.
Krug also suggested that it may be possible to help users catch the errors by displaying the email address in larger, clear monospaced font–possibly next to the or below the field where the typing occurs.
This stuck with me, but I wasn’t quite sold.
I pinged my friend Jonathan “Yoni” Knoll to see if he’d loan me about 15 minutes of his time to prototype something. Lucky me, he had just that much time to spare.
We (and by we, I mean Yoni) put together a really quick prototype form–it’s important to note that we didn’t put much more than 15-20 minutes into this, and this is only to see how the form “feels”. It can grow a number of different ways, styles and placements of elements can certainly be shifted around to your heart’s content.
The form looks pretty, uh, form-y:
Note at the bottom of the form the tiny little text letting you know that you should check your email address. In reality, I’m pretty sure most of us wouldn’t read it.
Also note that there was no “Repeat Email Address” text field in the form.
Instead, once you fill out your email address and tab away from it…
Notice that now my email address appears right before the Submit button. Krug initially suggested that the re-display of the email address might work best in a larger font next to the field where you entered in your email address.
The way this placement works now, in the prototype version that Yoni and I worked-up, the last thing you see before you submit is your own email address. I think this works particularly well in longer forms–it gives you the opportunity to re-check the most important piece of information in the form (to marketers, at least) right before you hit submit. The little “edit” link jumps you back to the field where you can make edits quickly and continue on with the submit action.
See this live in action here: http://infinityplusone.com/form-test.html
Remember: this is a prototype. One of the reasons that the edit link is to the left of the email address is because, after a couple attempts at placing it, this made the most sense to Yoni since email addresses are variable and that could cause the placement of the link to not always be in the exact same place. Your mileage may vary; something may work better for you.
The important piece of this prototype is seeing how it works in action, and how it potentially solves for having the “Repeat Email Address” field in your forms.
Tinker with it–and let us know what you think!
Posted in User Experience, User Experience Design | 61 Comments »
The link doesn’t work, but the concept is clear. I believe this is a very good idea! Thanks.
P.S. Placing ‘Edit’ to the RIGHT is ok since users get to see registration form only once (hopefully) and it’s OK if ‘Edit’ would be placed differently for shorter or longer email.
Oh and one more thing. I believe that displaying 2 email fields isn’t that bad an idea since even if you copy/paste you get to see your email more often.
I think this would help a bit, but I’m not sure that font size is the problem. I think people see their own e-mail address so much that they don’t read it anymore, no matter how big it’s displayed. It’s just a blur of characters. I know this is true for highly frequent words like ‘the’: research shows that people look at them as units, not as sequences of letters.
I think the real solution is in the browser offering to autocomplete or even prefill your e-mail address in a form field called ‘E-mail’. That way, you fill it in one time carefully, and then never think about it again. Firefox does this out of the box in many cases (but not in the e-mail field for this comment, for example).
I liked the concept but found the behaviour of the “edit” link confusint. I’d expected it to let me edit the larger text at the bottom directly. I didn’t notice the change in focus to the email field until after I’d clicked it a couple of times.
Tim
I think there is a danger of over engineering this problem – for such a small problem. User generally don’t mind entering their email address twice. However having looked at the 5 versions of the prototype, version 1 is by far the clearest and least obtrusive. As you mentioned, it definitely would hold more value on longer forms.
Nice job.
[...] userglue – na końcu formularza wyświetlany jest podany adres, z prośbą o weryfikację.UserGlue UserBlog » Blog Archive » Solving the “Repeat Email Address” Form Issue. Maybe. – Via BuzzIt!Posted in google buzz Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Name [...]
I would recommend updating the email “preview” on keypress.
If a user gets their email wrong the first time, then clicks the edit link returning cursor focus to the email field, they may type it incorrectly again and click submit missing the opportunity to see their mistake (except for on the dialog after submit which I assume is for test purposes).
Otherwise, solid solution to an annoying problem.
- Jordan
[...] Dialog also suggested this as his preferred solution. Another idea that Dan Naumman sent me was this one that suggests repeating the email address at the end of the form before the final submit button. I [...]
[...] One Consulting wordt echter geëxperimenteerd met een nieuw interessant patroon, in het artikel Solving the “repeat emailaddress” form issue. Steve Krug merkte namelijk in een discussie op dat de veel verkeerde e-mailadressen wellicht het [...]
Re version 5:
When I came as far as to the submit button, I started to read “submit” and went autopilot to push that button without reading the whole text. Others might react differently, this was just my reaction.
Interesting discussion and prototype.
Very useful article. I think submit button must be there from the beggining. From my point of view that is the only version that may confuse users.