Need someone to lead product management at your software company? I create software for people that create software and I'm looking for my next opportunity. Check out my resume and get in touch.

Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

User Experience

Form expectations

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 21 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

12 Jun 2003

It’s been said many times before, but developers still don’t seem to understand. If you have requirements for the contents of your forms, tell people up front. Don’t make them submit the form in order to find out that you need phone numbers formatted in a certain way or want a particular length for usernames and passwords.

Filling out an affiliate account application on eSellerate, I entered akalsey for my username and submitted the form. At that point I got a message telling me that my username needed to be at least 8 characters. Besides the fact that they didn’t tell me up front that my username should have been eight characters long, the size limitation is stupid and arbitrary. Why do they have a minimum length for my user name? They don’t have a minimum length for my address.

Comments

Anders Jacobsen
June 13, 2003 9:00 AM

Completely agreed. Furthermore, many websites have arbitrary interpretations of what constitutes a valid email address, something that there ARE standards for! (More info: http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email_addresses_with_a_are_valid.html)

This discussion has been closed.

Recently Written

Micromanaging and competence (Jul 2)
Providing feedback or instruction can be seen as micromanagement unless you provide context.
My productivity operating system (Jun 24)
A framework for super-charging productivity on the things that matter.
Great product managers own the outcomes (May 14)
Being a product manager means never having to say, "that's not my job."
Too Big To Fail (Apr 9)
When a company piles resources on a new product idea, it doesn't have room to fail. That keeps it from succeeding.
Go small (Apr 4)
The strengths of a large organization are the opposite of what makes innovation work. Starting something new requires that you start with a small team.
Start with a Belief (Apr 1)
You can't use data to build products unless you start with a hypothesis.
Mastery doesn’t come from perfect planning (Dec 21)
In a ceramics class, one group focused on a single perfect dish, while another made many with no quality focus. The result? A lesson in the value of practice over perfection.
The Dark Side of Input Metrics (Nov 27)
Using input metrics in the wrong way can cause unexpected behaviors, stifled creativity, and micromanagement.

Older...

What I'm Reading