Live Validation – An outstanding Solution

Victoria

4 min reading time

There are potential customers that come to your online shop with a clear intention of purchasing a product and still do not complete the order. According to current studies the abandonment rate in the checkout is around 69%! Determining what is interfering and how you can avoid this could be time-consuming. While there are many factors involved, one thing is certain. Live Validation or Inline Validation Integration can substantially reduce the drop-off rate.

Live Validation
Source: Unsplash

Real facts within the 3Step Checkout

The 3-Step Checkout is packed with 18 major usability features, altogether decreasing the shopping cart abandonment rate. In this article we describe the exceptional feature: Live Validation, its functions and advantages.

Contents

What is Live Validation?

The Live Validation feature provides the user with different types of real-time feedback corresponding to the checkouts form field. The user receives suggestions for a proper form fields completion or an error message if the criteria are not met. For example, if only the first name has been entered in the “Full Name” field, a message will appear under the form field stating that at least 2 words must be entered. Among other things, this feature is particularly helpful if typing errors occur during input and these are not immediately visible to the user, such as a wrong number in the Postal code.

Live Validation within the 3 Step Checkout

Optimization Potential

A study by Luke Wroblewski on best practices in online validation has shown clear success in the use of inline validations for the form fields.

According to Wroblewski, the following observations resulted from implementing inline validation:

  • The conversion rate of transactions increased by 22%.
  • The error rate was reduced by 22%.
  • Customer satisfaction increases by 31%.
  • The time needed to fill in the form decreased by 42%.

But not only Wroblewski explored the pressing need for inline validation, other platforms such userlutions.com also write that inline validation is a solution for user-friendly forms. Sophie Kruger emphasizes in her article that users often need concrete assistance for the input form fields. By integrating Live Validation, errors can be quickly detected and corrected without further frustration.

5 Validation advantages

A Baymard study on Inline Validation also confirms Sophie Kruger’s statement and names five advantages that can be achieved by integrating this feature.

Faster error detection

Users are immediately informed of errors with the help of the live inline validation which significantly simplifies the process of error localization. The user no longer needs to stop on a specific error page, but can immediately check and correct the error message and continue directly.

Error context still fresh in memory

Since the user is informed immediately after input of any invalid input, the time required for correction is significantly reduced, since the input and the context are still fresh in the user’s memory. On a common error page, the user often has to call the field context again and read his input again. Since this process can involve several fields and takes several minutes, the User may cancel the checkout process before he has checked all field labels again and added the invalid field value.

Boosts confidence

If an inline validation gives positive feedback, then the user also benefits without invalid entries. Positive from validation relieves the user of a certain cognitive burden because they no longer have to check the form for errors and validate it before submitting it. Instead, the customer can go directly to the next field and be sure that the input is valid. Positive inline validation can also provide a sense of rapid progress and execution because the user has “successfully completed” each field and the website provides encouraging visual feedback.

No more skipping form fields

Live Validation not only ensures that field entries are valid, but is also efficient to a certain extent. For example, omitted mandatory fields are highlighted when the user scrolls through the form fields with the Tab key (which more than 50% of users do during the validation, users are immediately notified when checkout process). With inline they tab through a required field without entering a value greatly reducing the likelihood of a user inadvertently skipping a required field.

Low level of credit card data despite PCI compliance

One of the ways that e-commerce sites with a lower level of Pci (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance can get by is because the user’s credit card data must never touch their server, but instead the user has to send their credit card data directly to the payment processor. A downside of this, however, is that any validation errors tend to erase the form input, since the e-commerce site obviously has no way to store data that it never touches or receives. Inline validation can prevent invalid input (e.g., a card number that is too short or too long, or the Luhn validation fails) from being submitted in the first place, thus avoiding reloading the page, which would delete all the user’s input.

Real-time validation not only within the 3 Step Checkout

The text verification during input in form fields is not only applied for the Checkout. This feature has already found its way into many other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Google. Many companies want to help their users reduce the frustration during registration on their portal or lower the error rate.

Connect with Google!

For a better use of the Live Validation feature, you can link it to another feature, for instance the Google Maps implementation. With the Google Maps implementation, the user receives automatically, as if by “magic”, suitable suggestions for an address entry. The street, city and postal code are matched with the Google database.

Furthermore, it is possible to extend the live validation to an e-mail validation and to generate a new feature that helps check the e-mail domain before the customer leaves the form field.

Conclusion: Live Validation stands for user-friendliness.

A feature like Live Validation is essential for a user-friendly checkout. Not only ensures a high degree of satisfaction, but also prevents a lot of frustration by enhancing the user experience in the checkout!

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Sources:
https://www.usabilityblog.de/die-conversion-von-webformularen-verbessern-mit-inline-validierung/
https://alistapart.com/article/inline-validation-in-web-forms/ https://userlutions.com/blog/usability-insights/inline-validation/ https://www.aforms2web.com/-/validierung-fehler-warnungen https://www.felixnagel.com/blog/artikel/2009/11/16/barrierefreie-live-validierung-von-formularen-mit-jquery/
https://baymard.com/blog/inline-form-validation