Find Motive

I was trying to signup for a new ad management service today, since EchoPic is getting decent traffic, to help deal with different ad services. After filling in all the required fields and double checking them myself, I clicked the submit button to be greeted with this:

“Password must containt a lowercase letter, an uppercase letter, a number and no spaces, no special characters.”

Reeeaally now? Would you like me to throw in some complex math equations and a short essay on world peace? I know that analogy sounds a little far fetched, but to your users thats what you might as well be asking them. Thats SIX restrictions on the password field. Thats at least 4 too many.

In the end I didn’t sign up. Make your signup forms simple and don’t force your users to make up new information. Generally users will use the same password for everything, so putting such tight restrictions on a password field is not a good idea.

My friend Jeff over at Big Trapeze has posted a great code snippet to prevent users from accidentally double submitting forms or refreshing the page and getting an annoying alert box.

Alert box shown when you try to refresh a page that was posted to.

Lately, while developing sites, I’ve started to deal with a lot of form submissions, and I’m finding that it takes extra steps to prevent people from accidentally submitting a form twice. Double-posting (hitting the Submit button more than once, or refreshing a page where data has been processed) can lead to all sorts of bad problems. - Big Trapeze

Check it out! Big Trapeze