From the course: User Experience for Web Design

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Handling errors gracefully

Handling errors gracefully

- Even with the best instructions and the clearest fields, people may still make typing mistakes. You need a good strategy for handling these errors. Of course, you want to do your best to catch errors before they cause people trouble. Any error is going to be disheartening to your visitors, and errors on forms are a big cause of abandonment. Some errors aren't really errors as such, but are just misunderstandings made because the computer didn't accept the format of the entry. We tend to present them as errors, but it's not the user's error, just something that's outside the computer's expected range of responses. One way to stop this type of situation is to use forgiving formats. For entries like phone numbers, let people enter spaces or parentheses as they see fit, and then the computer can strip that information away before it checks that the entry is valid. It's also best to do validation on a field by field basis. That way you can try and catch errors as soon as they happen and…

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