Re-Enter My Email Address… Why?

Before you ask me to re-enter my email address you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’.  Because if you’re not, I’ll be abandoning your form.

We’ve all been subjected to this scourge of the Internet over the last several years.  As you’re filling out an online form you come to the sudden realization that the form is asking you to put in your email address twice.  The first time I saw this I was dumbfounded.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why, in this day and age, we, the self proclaimed enlightened Internet folk, were taking cues from the worst the insurance industry had to offer.

I fumed slightly, but accepted that I would just have to cut and paste what I typed (or, more than likely was auto-filled by my browser) into this second field.  Then recently I found a site that was using javascript to block me from being able to cut and paste into the second field.  So now you’ve gone from making me duplicate information to jacking with how my input devices work?  Really?

Oh, I’ve heard a few excuses from people about why they put two email fields on their forms.

1. The email address is very important, it’s how the user will receive (insert notification here).
2. Their email address is their user id, it is critical it be right.
3. Bad addresses clog up my spam, err, mailing lists.
4. It was on the best practices list at xxxxxx.com.

Let’s start with reason #4 (because it’s my blog and I can do them in whatever order I want to).  First, you shouldn’t believe everything you read, especially if you read it on the Internet.  Second, and more importantly, is that every best practices list of any value in the world will tell you to eliminate duplication.  This reason is a non-starter.

Reason #3?  Also hooey.  If your mailer software was well done it would dispose of invalid email addresses.  Asking every user of your system to double up forever on part of their work so that you don’t have to do work once to correct your problem should never be the answer.

So let’s examine the first two reasons.  In these two instances it is important that you get the user’s correct email address.  However, let’s examine the reality of asking for their email address twice.

First of all, you’ll have the people like me who cut/paste it.  If I screwed it up in the first box, the second one will be identical.  You aren’t helping me.  The people who cautiously type it in to both boxes?  They were being cautious and would have gotten it right anyway.  So you didn’t really accomplish your goal there.

Additionally I believe you are missing the real point.  Your goal is to establish that the user is receiving emails at the address provided, not to see if they can type the same thing twice.  The only way to do this is to send an email to that address with a link or some other registration verification device and require the user to act on it.  So the form might go as follows:

1. Ask the user for their email address, then explain that the system will email them a code that they will enter on the next screen.  The user enters their email address and clicks the submit button.
2. On the second screen we ask the user for all of the information we want.  First name, last name, dog’s maiden name, whatever is pertinent.  The final field, just before the submit button, should ask for the registration code we emailed to the user.
3. The user submits their form, with a proper registration code, and all is right with the world.
4. In case the user did submit the wrong email address on the first form, we should provide a link on this second page for them to click and re-enter their email address, pre-populating the field from the information previously entered.

By asking for the registration code at the end of the form it gives our email time to arrive in the user’s email inbox and keeps them busy while we wait for it to do so.  This allows us to verify that the user can in fact receive emails at the address provided.

The next time you’re considering making your users work twice as hard, ask yourself if it is really worth it and if it will really accomplish your goal.  In most cases it isn’t and won’t.