Web Consulting Washington DC

Ryan Singer of 37 Signals gave a talk on ways to improve a sign-up forms for websites. It is a good refresher for web professionals to remember to think about the user experience first and foremost. It’s easy for developers to get into their projects’ technical goals and forget that their users are going to come with varying levels of expertise and experience. Its vitally important to put the user experience first, and “building momentum” as Ryan refers to it, is very important. Your website conversion or your web apps adoption rates depend on it.

I love using the “don’t make me think” rule of thumb, heck, it’s a core principal as far as I’m concerned. Your websites and web apps need to be designed to minimize the amount of “thinking” your users have to do when interacting with them. Especially with sign-up forms, if it’s complicated, if it’s long, if it has ambiguous language, this is going to work against you by increasing the likelihood of a frustrated user experience.

Tips, helpful advice, embedded reminders, are now more easily applied with AJAX technologies than ever before, so there’s even less of an excuse not use them. More on this topic soon.

By the way, yes, apparently the camera man was distracted by Ryan’s stage pacing, so unfortunately some of the presentation slides were not included, sigh… yes, that’s another topic for another day as well.

You found an interesting Web 2.0 looking website that promises you hours amusing entertainment but before you can go any further, you have to sign up for an account. You know the routine, and by now you have it down to mere clicks of your tab key thanks to AutoComplete that practically fills these suckers out for you. You click submit and just when you expect the doors to open, you get the following message…

You verification code has been sent to your email address. Please check your email and copy the verification number exactly a you see it. If it doesn’t arrive within a few minutes, check your junkmail folder… then bother us if its not there either, we’ll resend you another one.

What? Great, already your starting to have doubts about this website… its bad enough they don’t trust new users, they can’t even email you a link based verification, you actually have to TYPE the code in by hand? Groan. But you’ve too vested in the process, all those Tabs and AutoCompletes are going to be good for nothing if you don’t go through this right of passage.

So you open Outlook, your hand already on the mouse, and Outlook already downloading your new messages, bam, there it is, the verification code containing email. You open the email, you see the code, it’s a long ugly one with numbers, characters, mixed case. No worries. You double left click on it, and with your left hand you do a stealthy CNTRL-C to copy (you’re not some newbie, you know how to roll with the Cut ‘n’ Paste) and move the mouse back to the browser over the verification input bar… CNTRL-V to paste your left hand and last you click submit.

Your verification code you entered does not match the one we have recently sent you. Please try again.

What?! What is it talking about? You just did it perfectly. Your not wrong, it’s wrong! Ok, calm down. You do it again, double left click with the mouse, left hand CNTRL-C to copy, you move the point over, select the verification input field, CNTRL-P to paste, and this time RETURN for good measure.

Your verification code you entered does not match the one we have recently sent you. Too many attempts have been made, you may contact support and we may response at our earliest convenience.

Great. What happened?

Well… looks like your Outlook 2007 is picking up a trailing space. When double clicking, the highlight surrounds not just the word, but an extra trailing space. The reason for is that Word or Outlook is trying to help you by not leaving a space when editing text. But if you do a lot of single word copying from Outlook to your browser (in the case of verification codes or forgotten passwords), it can be a pain because it means you have to remember to remove the trailing space.

To change this quirky behavior, it’s very easy to do:

Step 1
Click Tools and select Options

Step 2
Select Mail Format tab

Step 3
Click on Editor Options

Step 4
Select Advanced

Step 5
Near the bottom of the page, next to “Use smart cut and paste” click on Settings

Step 6
Uncheck Adjust paragraph space on paste

Why this works?

Most verification codes come in their own line without anything else after it. So by disabling paragraph space, it doesn’t grab the last space into your browser. You can still edit your emails just fine, using “smart” cut and paste, your just make sure it doesn’t try anything too smart ass.

There’s 97 checkbox options in Outlook that you have to go through with until you found how disable this, but aren’t you glad I just told you? Your welcome.