Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

1. Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials Validation is an important element in web form development because when a user fills a form with necessary details and submit their job however being a human they often make mistakes. But a well-designed form can possibly improve user experience and the usability of your website designs and make the form filling process smooth. Poor validation can damage the whole designing experience. “Web form validation is the process where a web-form checks to see if the information that's been entered into it is correct”. Messages that you see in a pop up window are exception messages, are NOT validation messages.Simply a good validation says “talk to the user and tell them when something is wrong “

2. Web designers need to be careful while designing this most important aspect of the website. Let’s examine this graphic: Something appears to be wrong on this form... but the user is forced to guess what it is.it can leave users frustrated.. Here the user is given the information they need to fix the problem.

3. Three Common Types of Form Errors are: 1.Formatting Errors 2.Required Fields Errors 3.Match Errors The Design Solution While designing your web form in a different ways, there are generally three basic steps can help your user to fix the validation problem: 1.Inform the user that there is a mistake somewhere on the form. 2.Highlight the field that's incorrect. 3.Show them an example of what you are expecting. (ie: email@email.com) 4.Color is one of the best tools to use when designing validation Validation can be created in many ways. We’ll present some different techniques or examples that you can use to design your validation form: Alert user upon submit This is the most common validation process where user fills the form, presses submit button and gets notified if validation fails. However, informing user about required fields AFTER the submission is not a good solution. You must give a mandatory field option to the users.

4. Yahoo Mail signup form detail – which fields are mandatory? Required Information You can mark required fields with an asterisk (*).so that user will know exactly what fields have to be filled. A good way is to notify them with a form that indicates that all fields marked with an asterisk are required. Comment form on jankoatwarpspeed.com – which fields are mandatory here?

5. Only the exception is if all fields are required. There is no need to place asterisks on all fields Correct Format Ok, now what about the field format? Validating email address, URL, Date or phone number format? A better way to solve this problem is to provide additional information about the field format. Excellent example is Digg.com signup form Digg.com – a good example of dynamic tips How to present validation errors to the user? When users eventually press submit button and validation fails, you have to inform them about validation errors. 1.One of the possibilities is to show validation message summary at the top of the form. ASP.NET has built-in Validation Summary control for this.

6. 2.You can also change the color of labels where validation failed. 3.You can add an asterisk to the right of a non-validated field. 4.You can add a message to the right of a field i.e. –“Required” Summary Some other validations methods are available which you can implement to improve your web design experience: validation upon submit, validation feedback, confirmation fields, help indicators, Captcha filling etc. Plan your validation approach carefully for each project. Not everyone needs the same solution. Some are easy to implement some lack simplicity however taking some extra time to design strategies for your web forms will save time, money, and frustration in the long run. iMediadesign is a full service web design and development agency placed at toronto, that helps brand create unique identity and successful marketing campaigns.