Validate it. The right way. Part II.

Hi there! 👋

It's Victor, and today we continue to talk about validation. This is the second issue of the validation topic. If you missed the first, check it out.

I’d love to hear any feedback. Tell me your thoughts by replying to this email. 😊

Having validation is good, but have you tried to help your users so that the validation errors never happened?

How to prevent errors
Even though you should have proper validation, it would be the best thing if errors never happen.

To achieve this, you should help your users as much as you can so that they didn’t experience any difficulties and filled the form correctly the first time they did it.

How can you help:

→ Break large forms into groups of inputs

→ Pre-fill inputs when possible (e.g., location, country code)

→ Provide masks when possible (e.g., phone number format, dates, credit cards etc.)

→ Provide hints. For example, if you have some specific limitation for input, you can show it right away

→ Indicate which fields are required (opinionated, I’ll write an issue about it later)

→ Instead of asking the user to input something, you can simply provide him some choices. You can put the most frequent options at the top of the dropdown list. Or you can have some suggestions based on user location

→ It the user types in the wrong language, you can automatically replace it with the correct one. E.g., if the user fills credit card holder name & he has Cyrillic enabled, you can automatically replace it like he has typed in Latin instead

→ You can hide not-accessible dates in the calendar. Did you know that Twitter doesn't do it when you schedule a tweet? 🙁

Let's add some assurance
Consider showing the user that he has filled inputs correctly.

For tiny forms, like the login form, it might not be necessary. However, if the form is complex, it might be a good idea to show users right away that they are doing well.

Another example: you have a signup form. Your site is popular, so there is a high probability that the email is already taken.

The user has entered the email and switched to the password field. 
And nothing happened. He might be a bit worried if the email is taken or not.

To reduce possible stress, you can show right away if the email is acceptable or not.

That's it for now. In the next issue we will talk about various validation modes. I'll try to include gifs for the first time, hope it's going to be cool!

Thanks for reading!

👉You can always reply to this email with feedback & you could also check my Twitter, where I share my thoughts about user interfaces. 

Cheers,
Victor