Error Messages That Say What to Fix

Where enquiries actually stop

Somebody fills in your form, presses send, and the page appears to do nothing.

What happened is that a field turned red somewhere above where they are looking, and nothing told them.

They try again, the same thing happens, and they leave.

That is a completed enquiry lost at the very last step, and it happens on a great many small business sites.

What a colour change does not do

• Say which field is wrong, in words.
• Say what is wrong with it.
• Say what would be acceptable.
• Reach anybody not seeing colour.
• Get announced to a screen reader.

The fifth is the one that surprises people. A visual change to a field is frequently silent, so somebody listening hears nothing at all and has no way to know the form did not submit.

The three parts of a usable message

Which is the whole specification.

Name the field: telephone number.

Say what is wrong: this does not look like a telephone number.

Say what is acceptable: ten digits, with or without spaces.

All three in a sentence, positioned next to the field rather than at the top of the page.

That message works for everybody, in colour or not, listening or reading.

Most form tools support it and most sites use the default, which is a red border and nothing else.

A worked example

A business had a form with an eight per cent completion rate and assumed people were not serious.

Testing it, entering a telephone number with a country code produced a red outline and no message.

Anybody entering a number in a format the field did not expect was silently blocked, with no indication of what to change.

They loosened the validation, added a message saying what format was expected, and put the message beside the field.

Completions roughly doubled over the following two months.

Nobody had ever telephoned to report that the form did not work, because from the outside it looked as though it had.

Validate loosely

Which prevents most of these situations arising.

A telephone field rejecting spaces, brackets, a country code, or an extension is rejecting real telephone numbers.

An address field with a strict postal code format rejects anybody who types a space differently.

Accept whatever somebody types and clean it up afterwards, since you are going to read it yourself anyway.

The only field worth validating strictly is an email address, and even then a light check is enough.

Every strict rule on a form is a way of turning a customer away over a formatting preference nobody asked you to have.

The only question that matters is whether you can read what arrived and reply to it.

Say it at the top as well

For the case where several fields failed.

A short summary at the top listing what needs attention, with each item linking to its field, gives somebody an overview.

Move focus to that summary when the form fails, which is what makes it heard rather than merely present.

Without that, somebody submits, focus stays where it was, and the message they need is above them.

This is the single most useful change to a form that fails on more than one field at a time.

Do not clear what they typed

Which is the other common form failure and belongs here.

A form that empties itself on an error makes the person start again, and most do not.

Everything they entered should still be there, with only the problem field marked.

That is standard behaviour in any modern form tool and is broken mainly by custom-built forms.

Test it by submitting deliberately badly and seeing what survives the failure.

A long description box emptied because of a mistyped email address is the version of this that costs you the enquiry outright.

Test yours in five minutes

Since this is entirely checkable without any tools.

Submit the form empty and see what happens.

Submit it with a deliberately odd telephone number.

Submit it with an obviously wrong email address.

In each case, ask whether you can tell what to fix without looking for a colour.

Then do the same on a phone, where the message may be off screen entirely.

That last check finds the case where the form works perfectly on a desktop and fails invisibly for the majority of your visitors.

Say what happened after it works too

Which is the same problem in the opposite direction and is just as common.

A form that submits successfully and shows a small green tick, or scrolls silently to a confirmation, leaves somebody uncertain whether anything happened.

The result is duplicate submissions from people who were not sure, which you see in your inbox and misread as a spam problem.

Say plainly in words that the message was sent, what happens next, and roughly when they will hear back, and move focus to that confirmation.

That single message removes the duplicates and does more for somebody's confidence in the business than anything else on the page.

The counter-case

Some of this is handled for you.

Browsers now provide reasonable default messages for standard field types, so a simple form built plainly may be fine already.

Over-explaining also makes a form feel like an examination, and a message for every field is worse than a message where something failed.

And a form with three fields rarely produces multiple errors at once, so the summary at the top matters considerably less on a short one.

Do the individual messages first and add the summary only if your form is long enough to need it.

Submit your own form badly three ways, add messages naming the field and the expected format, and stop clearing what people typed.

The five minutes

1. Submit the form empty.
2. Submit an odd telephone number.
3. Submit a wrong email address.
4. Check you can tell what to fix.
5. Check nothing was cleared.
6. Loosen strict validation.
7. Repeat on a phone.

Step two finds the most damage, since a telephone field rejecting a perfectly ordinary number silently is the version of this that costs actual enquiries.

The wider form work is covered in forms everybody can complete.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.