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Has anyone had any experience where adding or removing client-side validation has affected conversion? Other comments talked about client-side validation being

Has anyone had any experience where adding or removing client-side validation has affected conversion? Other comments talked about client-side validation being mainly for UX and user convenience. But I'm wondering if it has a noticeable effect on whether or not people actually submit the form all the way to completion (i.e. no errors). I made a tool that I have server-side form validation. I found that saving the invalid input so that I could examine it later was extremely valuable in understanding what people were entering, so that I could make the tool smarter. A good example is like with Parsley's demo where it requires http:// http:// for the website URL. After seeing that people tried to enter URLs without http:// http://, I knew I could change my code to automatically infer it. http:// http:// is obvious, but a lot of times, people will surprise you. I don't have stats, but presumably this kind of change increases conversion. I realize this anecdote is a different effect than what I'm asking about client-side validation.

mariocesar 14y ago
What about a hook where every time a user makes a mistake it sends the related data to a centralized location. I can envision that could be easily to push this to Sentry https://getsentry.com/welcome/ https://getsentry.com/welcome/ using the Sentry Javascript Client
- kaliblack 14y ago
  You can do the same thing with Google Analytics events. Use a non-interactive event with "form validation" as category, field name as action and entered value as label. You may miss some events based on the service limits, but the common trends will be obvious.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I don't have hard stats on conversions; but I know that when I added some JS to turn form fields a nice green colour when validated filling out the form felt much more satisfying.
vidarh 14y ago
At a past company, we for a period had an (extremely invasive) script hooked up to a form that would log events on every change on the form, keypress by keypress. We could pretty much watch people type by tailing our log for a while... It probably wasn't a very nice thing to do in terms of privacy (I've more than once accidentally pasted stuff into a form that I wouldn't like to submit...), but for the day we did it, it taught us a lot of things about user behaviour we never thought about before (and we made sure to wipe all the data). E.g. users at the time anyway, had massive problems with dropdown lists (a substantial number of errors were down to users who had clearly started typing, and got what the dropdown moved to as a result of them typing out the correct value). We ended up avoiding them (expiry dates in our billing form, for example). (This was more than ten years ago, though, so our specific finding might very well be invalid now, with people more used to websites) I'm not sure how this type of validation would play out. On one hand, if done well, it gives people immediate feedback. On the other hand it gives you no hints about what causes common mistakes like that. I like the idea of logging the values on error...

mariocesar 14y ago

What about a hook where every time a user makes a mistake it sends the related data to a centralized location. I can envision that could be easily to push this to Sentry https://getsentry.com/welcome/ https://getsentry.com/welcome/ using the Sentry Javascript Client

kaliblack 14y ago
You can do the same thing with Google Analytics events. Use a non-interactive event with "form validation" as category, field name as action and entered value as label. You may miss some events based on the service limits, but the common trends will be obvious.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I don't have hard stats on conversions; but I know that when I added some JS to turn form fields a nice green colour when validated filling out the form felt much more satisfying.

vidarh 14y ago

At a past company, we for a period had an (extremely invasive) script hooked up to a form that would log events on every change on the form, keypress by keypress. We could pretty much watch people type by tailing our log for a while... It probably wasn't a very nice thing to do in terms of privacy (I've more than once accidentally pasted stuff into a form that I wouldn't like to submit...), but for the day we did it, it taught us a lot of things about user behaviour we never thought about before (and we made sure to wipe all the data). E.g. users at the time anyway, had massive problems with dropdown lists (a substantial number of errors were down to users who had clearly started typing, and got what the dropdown moved to as a result of them typing out the correct value). We ended up avoiding them (expiry dates in our billing form, for example). (This was more than ten years ago, though, so our specific finding might very well be invalid now, with people more used to websites) I'm not sure how this type of validation would play out. On one hand, if done well, it gives people immediate feedback. On the other hand it gives you no hints about what causes common mistakes like that. I like the idea of logging the values on error...