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Submitting Incomplete Form on Website

An e-commerce site featured the following form that allowed you to submit a catalog request. Notice that there is no indication whatsoever about what fields, if any, are strictly required.

We filled out the form, entering information in all fields except for the email address. This appeared to be valid, since as we noted above, there was no indication of what fields were strictly required. Upon submitting the form, the following page displayed.

This server-side "bogus mail" error message was caused by our leaving the E-mail form field blank. Instead of presenting this non-intuitive error message to the ordinary user, a better approach would be one of the following.

Write a client-side Javascript form validation routine. What do we mean by client-side? The validation routine would run in the user's Web browser when he/she clicks the Submit button, before the form information is sent to the Web server for processing. These routines are relatively simple to write and require essentially no "computing horsepower" on the client side. The validation routine passes the form information to the server for processing only if all edit checks and validations pass; otherwise, an error message is displayed to the user that clearly informs him/her of the errors that need to be corrected. This avoids wasting bandwidth by sending data containing errors to the server for processing, and also avoids wasting server resources to process the invalid data.
If server-side validation is preferable, write appropriate server-side error handling routines that catch invalid data and present clearly written and easily understandable error messages to the user.

Regardless of what option is chosen, a necessary step is to list the required form fields. This gives the user a complete understanding of what information is optional and what is strictly required, so he/she will have a fair chance at completing the form properly the first time around. A common way of doing this is to format the required fields' labels in a red and bold font, then displaying a legend somewhere like "required fields are labeled in red."

If this company had used Testware to put the website through its paces, we would have caught this error in Web testing and/or functional testing.