Borrowed from the blog: Usability.ca

Dmitri runs Wild Apricot

One important way to show respect to website visitors is to treat what they type in as something precious. Have you ever been in one of these situations?

• You fill out a form and submit it. You make a slight mistake (maybe missed a field). When the form comes back it has lost some or all of the information you have entered. (Luckily, such clueless websites are getting rarer)
• You accidentally click on the “Reset” button and everything you typed is wiped out. Is it your fault? No! Web developers should not have put this button on the form in the first place. A reset button is an old – and I think very stupid – convention they blindly followed. Do you ever really need a “Reset” button?
• You accidentally click outside the web page you are working on – maybe on a link to another website. As it loads in your browser your current form disappears into the void – and the Back button does not help.

• You are interrupted by a telephone call. You come back to your half-filled form, complete it and submit… only to get the message, “Your session has timed out. Please login again”. All your data is lost. ARGH!!

I just lost my own precious time on an airline website. I filled out the form and was asked to login to confirm my status. After I typed an incorrect password, my flight data disappeared. How do you avoid these problems in your web app? (And you really want to do it. Even if it happens once in a 1000 times, it generates ill-will and hurts your business results)

Another good idea for a lengthy form is to let people save their work at any moment – and come back to finish it later. Maybe they are missing some key piece of information – or maybe they have an urgent task to do. Give them a button like “Save Draft”. If you implement such a feature – don’t bug your users to fill out all mandatory fields. Let people save whatever they have. Check mandatory fields only when they submit the final form.

Going further, implement auto-save of user input every few minutes.Some websites auto-save your input as soon as you move to the next field. Since the save happens in the background (using Ajax technology), the user is not inconvenienced, and does not have to wait.

Google Gmail is a good example – it auto-saves your draft email every few minutes. You can also save manually at any time.

Auto-save can even work if a user is not logged in (using cookies). But be careful: this has privacy implications. What if a visitor uses a public PC to access your website? His information can be accidentally disclosed to the next user of that PC. Let people know if you are auto-saving their data – and let them disable this feature or delete the saved data at any time.

Finally about those “session timeouts”. Whenever possible, you should not kick people out of your system if they are in the middle of a long form. Geeks call such code “keep-session-alive”. Sometimes this is not wise due to security issues – then you have to ask them to login AND still keep the submitted form data (not easy but doable).

Bottom line: Showing respect is always a good idea – in person or on the Web.