Also
- they get bonus points for the "Please enter your full name." when there's a é in your name. Stéphanie is my full (first) name.
2024, time to start accepting special characters in your forms?
- no field is marked as mandatory, but they all are, so you need to guess that you need to fill them all and that the save is disabled
Gosh, next person who tells me "UX is common sense" gets 2h of me ranting about forms in 2024.
If you need help with forms (trust me you do), check @geoffreycrofte's book "Web Forms: Costly Mistakes You Want to Avoid": https://shop.geoffreycrofte.com/b/pack-ebook-checklist-web-forms-geoffrey-crofte (with a preface by me, based on all those poor experiences)
I also have a whole talk on what happens when people have false assumptions around names for real users, from almost not getting a parcel, to the risk of being denied boarding a plane because the name on the ticket was snipped due to a ë and the people at the gate were very picky about "names on boarding pass need to be the same as name on the passport"
My é is also a nightmare for conference passes printers, hahaha, sorry about that.
Sep 3, 2024, 8:35 AM@geoffreycrofte, is this the official page for the book? Do you have the book publishing date? Happy to feature it on @frontenddogma!
@j9t yup it's published, I think the "official" page is https://geoffreycrofte.com/book/web-forms-costly-mistakes-you-want-to-avoid/en/ but I wanted to promote the checklist, because, wow, people do need those!
@geoffreycrofte @frontenddogma
@stephaniewalter @j9t @frontenddogma that's the right page indeed. Thanks for promoting it Stéphanie.
If you need more info to help promoting it, I'm here 😊
I also provided a Press link in the footer of the official page, but maybe things are missing.
Don't hesitate, and thank you in advance for the help. It's not always easy to write, design, and promote it at the same time 😭
@stephaniewalter at some point British Airways refused to let me include an apostrophe in the surname when booking online, despite the apostrophe appearing in the passport. Luckily in that case the gate staff didn’t pay so much attention.
@stephaniewalter re airport: French passports electronic info store hyphenated last names with a space, not an hyphen.
so we kept having computer say no when entering “kuznicka-marry” and not “kuznicka marry”
(we already knew the system wouldn't handle thre proper ź...)
@stephaniewalter ugg, can relate. Our site is not (yet) UTF-8 due to reasons, and being in Canada there’s lots of French and other characters to entify. Here’s to better support for all softwares.
Slightly related:
Okay maybe your CRM is from the dark ages where disk space was expensive.
But if you cut off the delivery adress you get from the front end, you are doing it wrong.
Bonus points for the validation logic that autocompletes my street name to the long version and thereby makes entering my valid address impossible.
Sep 3, 2024, 11:19 AM@stephaniewalter @geoffreycrofte Not sure how I feel about the purchase form of that book only using a placeholder with no label for the email address field…
@tero Agreed, irony isn't lost on me, but this is "out of the box author has no control over this" payhip tool. I'm using it too for my shop https://shop.stephaniewalter.design/ I feel the frustration, I wish they would hire usability / accessibility experts at some point.
You can always buy it from Amazon, Kobo, Apple books, fnac, and other places https://geoffreycrofte.com/book/web-forms-costly-mistakes-you-want-to-avoid/en/
But I prefer to put the author's direct site, since, there are less commissions than the other plateforms
@tero also maybe you can report this to contact@payhip.com? I've already complained about it, I think
@geoffreycrofte too. But the more people complain about a feature, the faster it gets fixed, hopefully? Thank your help!
Sep 3, 2024, 1:00 PM@tero thank you!! Let's hope this helps move their roadmap a little bit!
Sep 3, 2024, 4:22 PM@stephaniewalter @geoffreycrofte FWIW, their customer service responded that they understand the importance of accessibility and user-friendly forms, and promised to pass the suggestion to the dev team.
Could be either standard CS lip service or a real answer. Time will tell, I guess.
@tero @stephaniewalter unfortunately I don't have any power over the lack of accessibility of their tool.
Most "quick" e-commerce solutions come with "dirty" forms. Hence the book.
But I can assure you Payhip got there Accessibility review from me on multiple features, and "it's in the roadmap" was their answer 2 years ago.
Honest feedback from a customer and bling user: I've completed the process, but it was a real p&in in the &ss. Also forwarded to Payhip.
I did my best 😊
Thanks!
@stephaniewalter try to fill in an international phone number in some US-American based web sites. Some US-based UX designer's horizon ends @ (AAA)-BBB-CCCC . Heard fidelity is one of them.
Overseas = to boldly go where no US UX designer has gone before!1!!
@stephaniewalter
Names of people cannot be invalid.
Sep 3, 2024, 11:01 AM@yournameisinvalid @stephaniewalter Nomoj de homoj ne povas esti nevalidaj.
Sep 3, 2024, 10:51 AM@stephaniewalter Personally I refuse to use the term “special character”. There is nothing special about é, å, þ, etc. Millions of people use them every day, have them in their names, addresses etc.
@tml yes but if I say "time to start accepting diacritics and other non Latin characters" I don't think people will get what I mean.
Also, I funnily, I think I have this joke in one version of the talk where I went "because the other characters weren't special enough?"
But, yeah, I agree, nothing special with a é. I also hate when they say "non English characters", that means, nothing.
@stephaniewalter @tml I mean there are various choices like "accept a full range of characters" "accept so-called special characters" and probably others. But I especially like your "the other characters weren't special enough" line. Wouldn't want to take away a good joke just to make a point <wink>
@stephaniewalter I had the "é" problem recently with one of our suppliers and their error message was cryptic so I raised a ticket. When they explained, my reaction was "you used to be a Belgian company, surely the concept of letter é shouldn't be alien to you?" Turns out, it used to work, it just started failing after they were acquired by an American company 🤔
@stephaniewalter I swear it wasn't long after @robpike retired from Alphabet Inc. that YouTube stopped displaying UTF-8/Unicode in usernames in the comments field.
When I find a company that can't handle UTF-8 in their job application forms, I usually decide to stop the employment application process entirely. I can handle some technical debt.
Dragging a company kicking and screaming from 30+ years in the past to the present, is thankless work and no amount of money is worth that to me.
@stephaniewalter omitting é is really bad.
Worse than not supporting UTF-8/Unicode.
é existed in extended ASCII which is 1970s vintage (some variants are even 1960s vintage) and ISO/IEC 8859-1 is from 1987.
@teajaygrey I love the use of the word vintage in here. From now on, I'll explain to people that my é is not "invalid, but vintage", muuhhaaa