Users Don’t Know (and Don’t Care) About Your Data Formats

The overarching principle of both forms and wider UX practice could be summarized as “be forgiving.”

Things that users do can often seem strange and unpredictable, but they probably have 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, I promise)

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 full names to consist of multiple names, with hyphens...