What’s in a phone number?
One of the most tedious and tricky things a web developer does is designing good form validation. It poses interesting challenges in UI design, but also in not being a hurdle for interested users. One of the most common thing I experience when signing up for stuff is this.
And the reason… is this
(not my actual phone number) The problem here is that Iceland doesn’t use area or city codes - there is one uniform set of seven-digit phone numbers across the whole country. However, Apple doesn’t make room for that, it assumes all phone numbers must have an area code. In this case it is easy enough to get past this, I just move the first digit to the area code.
Another common error is in validating e-mail addresses. Many websites assume an email address has to be xxx@yyy.zzz where the x, y and z must be alphabetical or numerical or perhaps a dash (-) and a period(.). However, e-mail addresses in general are not constrained to that. A useful feature of GMail is that you can add a plus (+) after your username, followed by any string you want. For example user+aha@gmail.com gets routed to user@gmail.com, but the owner of that mailbox can filter on the +aha part if she wants. This is very handy when registering for something, you can indicate where you are registering in the address and set up filters to route messages to that address directly to a tag (such as the trash). The problem is that many (most?) websites don’t allow you to register an address containing the +.
Perhaps the silliest example was the one that this guy fell victim to, a checkbox that said “uncheck this box if you don’t want us to email you”, but then the form wouldn’t validate unless the box was checked. Ingenious.