Example Form Error Messages
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on our websites. And they happen in real life. Sometimes it’s because we made a mistake. Or maybe a system failed. Maybe it really was the user’s fault. Whatever the cause, these errors—and how they are communicated—can have
Form Error Messages Javascript
a huge impact on the way someone experiences your website or app. Often overlooked, an ill-constructed html5 form error messages error message can fill users with frustration, and send them packing. A well-crafted error message, on the other hand, can work wonders. It can
Form Validation Error Messages
turn a moment of frustration (abandonment) into a moment of delight (and ideally, conversion). Every error, regardless of who is to blame, becomes a point of friction for your users. Well-written error messages can help reduce that friction. As UX http://uxmovement.com/forms/how-to-make-your-form-error-messages-more-reassuring/ designers, we like to reduce friction. So let’s get on with it. Introducing the 4 H’s So how do we write, or rewrite, our error messages to keep our users on track? It’s not that difficult, really. We just need to consider the 4 H’s of writing error messages. Error messages need to be: Human Helpful Humorous Humble Let’s look at these more closely. 1. Human The number one rule is to make sure your error messages sound like they’ve been http://uxmas.com/2012/the-4-hs-of-writing-error-messages written for humans. There’s nothing more frustrating than an error like this one. It sounds like it has been written by a robot. For a robot. Put your customer service hat on—think of your error message as a conversation with your user. Make sure it’s polite, understandable, friendly and jargon-free. The Firefox error message is a better example. Think about your audience. How would you explain the error to them, in human speak? Write those words down. That’s your error message, right there. 2. Helpful OK, so your error message is readable. But is it helpful? The rules to crafting helpful error messages are fairly straightforward. Ask yourself: Is it visible? There’s no point displaying an error message if the user doesn’t even see it. Think about the message size, colour and location of your error messages. Make them prominent. Does it explain clearly what went wrong? Your error message needs to explain the problem as clearly as possible. And it needs to be specific. A vague error message that says, “An unexpected system error has occurred” is just lazy programming. It’s of no use to anyone. And most importantly ... Does it help the user recover? What do they need to do next? How can they get back to what they were doing, as fast as possible? 3. Humorous A short sprinkling of humour is often a great way to diffuse the frustration of an error. Keeping y
· See all 186 articles based on findings from our e-commerce usability research Subscribe by E-Mail or RSS Improve Validation Errors with Adaptive Messages Jamie Appleseed · February 10, 2015 This is pretty much as bad as it gets. The user http://baymard.com/blog/adaptive-validation-error-messages is just told their input is invalid with no hints as to why that is or how they can fix it. Form validation errors are inevitable. Yes, they can (and should) be minimized, but validation errors won’t ever be eliminated – they are a natural part of complex forms and user’s data input. The key question then is how to make it easy for the user to recover from form errors. error messages In this article we’ll go over findings from our usability studies on how the wording of validation error messages largely determines the user’s error recovery experience, and how “Adaptive Error Messages” have shown to significantly reduce the user’s error recovery time. Common fields that we frequently observe to cause cause validation issues during testing include: phone number (formatting), state text field (‘TX’ vs. ‘Texas’), dates (month names or digits), monetary amounts (decimal form error messages separator, thousand separators, currency, etc) credit card number (are spaces allowed?), and address (street number in address line 1 or 2?). Generic Error Messages When benchmarking the checkout process of 100 major e-commerce sites, we found that most form validation error messages are woefully generic. This is problematic because it doesn’t do much in way of helping the user understand what the error is and how to fix it. Generic error messages tend to run the spectrum from unhelpful to completely useless. For instance, during benchmarking we saw the ‘Phone’ field yield error messages such as: “Invalid” “Not a valid US phone number” “Not a valid 10-digit US phone number (must not include spaces or special characters)” The first error message is obviously the worst as it offers zero help as to why the input isn’t accepted – it just states that the site doesn’t consider it “valid”. The second error message is still pretty bad, in that it just says the input isn’t a “valid US phone number” but it doesn’t hint at why that might be. The third error message is better than the others because it not only states that it must be a US phone number but also indicates that a country code, spaces, or other formatting, will caus