Form Validation: Too Tight Validation Can Hurt

For your users, filling a form does not have to be a tough chore. Sometimes, too much validation may get in the way of a great user experience and the user may even give up filling the form. Though form validation is something essential for your forms, it is also good that you relax the validation and not insist on little details that will not make much difference in the end.

For example, a form may have an entry for the user to enter their phone number. Insisting that the user must enter the phone number in a certain format will not make a difference on the information they have entered. In the end, you still get the number you wanted so why should you put your users under the strain of placing brackets and hyphens in their phone number?

If you want to have your users filling and submitting the web forms successfully, it is good that you encourage this by reducing the validations you place on the data entry. As long as you are getting the right data, the format does not necessarily need to be in that format. A good user experience encourages the user to enter the correct details and complete the form quickly.

Helpful Error Messages

Error messages also need to be helpful and easy to understand for the user.

All in all, the user experience when filling a form is very important. Always try not to compromise the user experience with unnecessary validations.

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