An interesting topic I thought would be better served as a post. Are email confirmation fields still needed in modern web forms?
Recently I was tasked with building a registration form. This form had a lot of fields in it including an email and confirm email field. I made the case for removing it because I felt another field was just a barrier to entry and in the age of “Sign Up Using Facebook” buttons anyway, the tolerance people have for long forms has dwindled.
They were always redundant
Think back to a time when you last filled out a form that had a email confirmation field. Did you really type your email address twice, or did you just copy and paste your email into the confirmation field? Chances are you just copied and pasted your email into the confirmation field kind of making it completely redundant.
What is the alternative?
There are some clever solutions out there, one of them is after the user has entered their address and tabbed out to display some text in bold beneath the field that says: A confirmation email will be sent to someemail@gmail.com, please confirm this is correct.
Remember: A much more friendlier form that has one less field is always good for business. Great design is taking away not adding new things in.
