Lately, it seems to be increasingly common to find web forms with duplicate fields, particularly for the email address. It’s a low likelihood that a user would make the exact same typo in both fields, so by ensuring that the two fields contain matching data, we can more thoroughly prevent user error.
In his “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design“, Ben Shneiderman states,
As much as possible, design the system so the user cannot make a serious error. If an error is made, the system should be able to detect the error and offer simple, comprehensible mechanisms for handling the error.
A worthy goal, to gracefully avoid user error through the design of an interface. But we all know, from experience and observation, that users pretty much hate forms – and definitely don’t want to fill out the same field twice. Duplicate fields are not graceful.
We already have email validation techniques that range from syntax checks to contacting the mailserver. Programming & form submission time may increase, but this is a small price to pay to reduce the user’s burden. Computers were meant to be labor-saving devices – that means labor-saving for users, not just programmers, designers, servers or other computers.
So what is really more important – error prevention or user satisfaction? I say user satisfaction. And I think they’d be more satisfied with a few seconds of extra submission time than they would with having to type the same thing twice. What do you think?
Have any studies been done about this? I’d like to know.
6 Comments
There really is no sure fire way to make sure the user has entered a valid email besides emailing them and making them click a link from that email. What do you think about this practice? Would you recommend giving the user immediant access to the resource and lock them out after a period of time if they have not verified their email?
Well the methods I linked to in this post do make sure the email is valid, but they won’t guarantee it’s owned by the person entering it. So yeah, if you need to identify that a person is who they say they are, then one way to do that is with the confirmation email.
I would recommend giving immediate access to the resource but having a notification beside certain locked features that says you can’t use this until you verify your email. That way you aren’t blind-siding them with being kicked out, and you’re able to give them the option to change the email they registered with, in order to verify that one instead. In case they made a typo or whatever.
I agree with you, but in the case of error prevention… I have mistyped my e-mail twice now, and neither service have offered a way to fix that.
As for duplicate forms, I havent seen that many cases of it, but sites like Tumblr are great uses of simple form entries.
I think I’ve seen the duplicate fields used more on corporate lead-generation forms, like “register to download this whitepaper” and stuff like that.
When I read the title of the post, I thought you were talking about password fields. I rarely see a duplicate for the e-mail, but they do exist. I don’t even bother with correctly filling out e-mail inputs, my browser generally auto-completes them. However, between risking an error in the e-mail address and bothering users with extra things to fill out, I say yay for risk!
Yeah I do see it a lot with passwords too. Good point about auto-complete features on browsers; I hadn’t considered that.