Additional Error messaging for LO Donation Forms
Good Afternoon - i wish to provide a problem and solution that has come up with a donor of ours who is almost totally blind and attempted to use our site to donate.
As it turns out, she had attempted a donation that didn't go through and the Error messages that came up as defaults for the fields were buried further within the context of the form.
I'm proposing a solution that would help our visually disabled donors realize the issue without look around for it, and it seems to be an easy fix and that is this:
- In the Top-of-page warning, the Warning Flag "There was a problem processing your request" should also list the issues that normally pop up around the form fields immediately under it. That way, the list is viewed/read/heard right away and then they can scan form for the field label itself.
For example:
If a user had neglected the First Name field and Credit card was invalid; the Warning Flag should read:
"There was a problem processing your request
- A first name is required
- Your credit card number is invalid."
And of course those fields would be highlighted separately within the forms below.
Other peers of ours use this donation form, and appears to behave the same way. This will help donors across multiple uses.
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Guest
- Jun 28 2016
- Reviewed: Voting Open
| Area of the Product | Donations |
| Org/Company Name | AmeriCares |
Related ideas
Additional error messaging is necessary as it is discouraging and frustrating for potential donors when they want to make an online donation but keep receiving the general error messaging and don't know what the problem was.
We definitely need the warning message to specify the error to make this more user friendly; it's damaging to our reputation and our relationships with donors.
Although I haven't used this specific form, I understand that those fields with a red asterisk are required. Can I presume that, if a field is not completed correctly, the red asterisk will flag it for an update. Can the error message indicate the user should look for this symbol (*)?
We are also experiencing this issue with our donors. Another related issue is the e-Card character limit within the donation form. WE currently have a message stating the character limit, but the cursor does not stop/freeze if a donor exceeds the limit. Then when they attempt to process payment, the general error message appears on their screen. They have to scroll down to see the character exceeding, so most do not see that and assume there is a problem with their credit card. This leads them to phone me and I have to perform a workaround. Is there any way to cue donors who exceed the character limit by programming the cursor to stop moving? For example, https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/textarea.html#simple