1. How do you reliably extract forename+surname from a single name field<p>2. Same for the City/State field<p>3. Half the world will enter dd/mm/yy and half will enter mm/dd/yy for date of birth (and the geeks will enter yy/mm/dd ;-). How do you check for that error?
Speaking as a decently computer-savvy person with a bit of attention problem - I often have to try to resubmit multiple times on non-unified text fields because I miss things, and then my <i>password</i> doesn't get saved. Then, rushing through it for the third time, my Captcha turns out to be wrong, etc. I've actually abandoned lots of forms I planned on filling out because of non-unification.<p>I for one like this post.
Do average users, let's say facebook's audience, use tab to navigate between fields? I always assumed tab usage was mostly reserved for the geekier keyboard/hotkey using crowd.
I think that too often form UX airs on the side of simplicity and that unified text fields are a pleasant counter to the bulk of forms. Re-checking this comments this morning led me to check out what kind of variations a developer might want to anticipate.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)#Current_addressing_schemes" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)#Current_add...</a><p>It can be tough to determine the point at which this will yield seriously diminishing returns in terms of development time as the domain of users goes international.<p>I realize the following question is fringe-related at best, but does anyone else like to have fun with the company field instead of (appropriately) leaving it blank? Thanks to me my friend now gets ThinkGeek catalogs for the 'his' company: "pornography inside"
How does one maintain clean data in their database if they do this. Countless people will type things in their own way.
Miami,FL
Miami, FL
miami,fl
miami fl
etc.
would a city/state autocomplete be the best here, but what about other sections of the required data?
He should be validating the user's input before they are even allowed to submit the form (I use jQuery Form Validation). In addition to validation, he can mask inputs require his fields are entered a certain way.<p>However, this sorta falls apart when you think about internationalization. Phone numbers are a good example. There are so many ways a phone number can be entered that it's almost always best to let the user type in the number in whatever format they want and then validate based on <i>most</i> US/Canada and International formats.
It's really just another approach to data entry. Instead of ensuring that the data is good before submit, by using dropdowns and such, you accept the data and then verify it.<p>I've seen e-commerce sites do this with address. They let you enter three free form lines, then send it to their address verifier and give it back to you to confirm. You can either accept it (which then saves the company money because it has ZIP+4) or keep your input as-is.
I wouldn't do ALL of these, but it is pretty easy to avoid multiple inputs for things like U.S. phone numbers. I like the approach of MaskedInput: the user can type parens and dashes or not; if they type them, they're ignored. In any case, we get the format we want.<p><a href="http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/" rel="nofollow">http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/</a> (click demo)
My pet peeves:<p>Why can't the selection of country be simplified? Why do I need to scroll past Afghanistan, United States Minor Outlying Islands, etc to find the US? It should be easy to guess what country I'm in and let me correct.<p>Why do I have to pick "New York" from a listbox? Let me enter my zipcode (Apple does this on their store).
Non-unified text fields do turn me off. There are some cases where it's absolutely reasonable. But the login to one of my accounts is four input boxes which could be consolidated into two. Drives me nuts and makes me reluctant on going back.