Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

A really clever solution to the problem of mistyped email addresses: rather than forcing you to re-type, Russ’ form forces you to re-read by taking your address and displaying it at the end of the form. Writ large outside the context of a text field, you can’t help but look at it and maybe spot a wayward character.

That “maybe” tells us what we all already know, though: it needs testing. The standard retype approach might just work better. Despite the common complaint that “everyone” just copies and pastes their initial input, I would posit that the kind of people who are most likely to make typos in their email address—namely my father—aren’t going to copy and paste. They’ll just do what the form says. I don’t copy and paste either, but I wear a seatbelt when I’m driving, too.

In any case, this approach feels nicer. Taking a piece of information and redisplaying it out of context is my own favored technique for catching typos. When I’m writing an essay or a proposal, I invariably wind up printing a hard copy and attacking it with a red pen. If I’m writing a blog post like this one in MarsEdit, I write in a small, monospace font and proofread in a full-fidelity HTML preview. The difference in typeface, size, and line length is a massive aid. The context switch lets me spot issues I would otherwise have glossed over, and it may be that the same thing works wonders for email forms. We’ll see.