Hi,
I'm currently adding a bunch of sites to dmoz and i'm experiencing some troubles related to form usability.
I post my impressions here, hoping they can help to improve the form.
I know the captcha can keep out spammers, but if a regular user mistypes the code, he gets an error and the suggestion go back in your browser if you need to resubmit the form.
First, the message is wrong. You can't just go back, you have to reload the captcha and the page.
If you just go back you'll see the same captcha, but even if you type the correct code it won't work.
On the other hand, if you reload the page (but you have to work out this by yourself) you lose all the fields and you have to start from scratch, which is a little frustrating.
The optimum solution would be to provide a link on the error page (something like try again) which leads the user back to the form reloading the captcha and, if possible, refilling the fields already inserted.
Another little problem is that some kind of error should be reported earlier.
I've filled a form, submitted it, but i swapped the url and description field.
Ops, go back, put fields in right order, resubmit. captcha wrong.
Go back, refresh, rewrite the form, resubmit. Wrong captcha again (damned O and 0).
Go back, refresh, rewrite, resubmit. The site is already in the directory.
Ops, i didn't checked properly, but if you told me earlier i could have spared some time trying to submit a site which is already there.
You can say that such errors can be avoided by carefully composing the form, but i've experienced that such errors happen more often than you may think... and they are simply avoidable just doing a little engineering on the submission form.
Hope this can be useful.
I'm currently adding a bunch of sites to dmoz and i'm experiencing some troubles related to form usability.
I post my impressions here, hoping they can help to improve the form.
I know the captcha can keep out spammers, but if a regular user mistypes the code, he gets an error and the suggestion go back in your browser if you need to resubmit the form.
First, the message is wrong. You can't just go back, you have to reload the captcha and the page.
If you just go back you'll see the same captcha, but even if you type the correct code it won't work.
On the other hand, if you reload the page (but you have to work out this by yourself) you lose all the fields and you have to start from scratch, which is a little frustrating.
The optimum solution would be to provide a link on the error page (something like try again) which leads the user back to the form reloading the captcha and, if possible, refilling the fields already inserted.
Another little problem is that some kind of error should be reported earlier.
I've filled a form, submitted it, but i swapped the url and description field.
Ops, go back, put fields in right order, resubmit. captcha wrong.
Go back, refresh, rewrite the form, resubmit. Wrong captcha again (damned O and 0).
Go back, refresh, rewrite, resubmit. The site is already in the directory.
Ops, i didn't checked properly, but if you told me earlier i could have spared some time trying to submit a site which is already there.
You can say that such errors can be avoided by carefully composing the form, but i've experienced that such errors happen more often than you may think... and they are simply avoidable just doing a little engineering on the submission form.
Hope this can be useful.
