Comments on: Spaces are not allowed https://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/ User Experience Design, Research & Good Old Fashioned Usability Fri, 27 May 2011 13:38:27 +0000 hourly 1 By: Mary https://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-161614 Fri, 27 May 2011 13:38:27 +0000 http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-161614 I can go one better than that.

I just tried to log in to a site with my email address, and it gave me an error because I had copied and pasted it, with a space after the final character of the email address (so instead of ending with .com, it ended with .com followed by a space).

The error message was ‘please enter an email address’.

]]> By: James K. Lowden https://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-65 Tue, 28 Nov 2006 02:31:56 +0000 http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-65 Postcodes are nothing. What about credit card numbers? They’re *printed* with spaces, so you can read them. How many 16-letter words do you know? No one can read a 16-digit number without some kind of grouping. Commas, dots, hyphens, spaces, all make fine separators.

Yet, when we’re entering a credit card number into a web form, we’re almost universally expected to enter 16 digits without spaces, without any aid to help us verify the number is correct, or even that the right number of digits were entered. Gee, guys, it’s only money, you know?

All because some webhead hasn’t learned basic UI rules, and arrogantly thinks his customers should provide their data in a form convenient to him. Never mind that he has to verify the data and produce the error messsage, and that at least some of his customers will go away.

]]> By: Andy Baker https://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-5 Sat, 21 Oct 2006 16:17:44 +0000 http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-5 Oh. Don’t get me started on Flash UI’s. I’m saving that one for when I’m in a really bad mood :)

]]> By: Harry Brignull https://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-4 Sat, 21 Oct 2006 15:55:38 +0000 http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2006/10/21/spaces-are-not-allowed/#comment-4 I just started writing a rant about how developer packages (like dreamweaver) should offer palettes of standard forms like this, with usable validation feedback. This would avoid reinventing the wheel badly. It reminds me of exactly the problem of early versions of Flash that didn’t offer decent scroll-bar widgets so developers had to build their own from scratch. Every website would have infuriatingly different scroll bar widgets, each with their own shortcomings.

Have you seen this form builder tool?

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