Chapter #47. Be Forgiving – Users Don't Know (and Don't Care) How You Need the Data
The overarching principle of both forms and wider UX could be summarized as "be forgiving."
Things that users do can often seem strange and unpredictable, but they probably have really good reasons:
The user who can't save their name because it has a special character (like an accent or apostrophe)
The user who can't enter a phone number because you're validating for phone number rules of the wrong locale
The user who does (or doesn't) put spaces between groups of digits in their payment card number
The user who spells their name with an emoji (this will happen)
Just because your developer set telephone fields to be 12 digits and 12 digits only, don't inflict this kind of madness on your poor users.
Your software should be forgiving—it should allow names to be comprised of multiple names, with hyphens and apostrophes. It should let users choose to skip non-mandatory fields. It should allow phone numbers with and...
