How can we meet people where they are and design forms that reduce barriers and help people correct the errors that are bound to happen?

• Sometimes the pressure to get it right is stressful and the stakes are high. Our team focuses on building forms for traditionally marginalized communities that enable access to fundamental human services and benefits.

• Forms are complicated. Even how we ask for something seemingly as simple as someone's name can be alienating if we ask them to enter it in a way that doesn’t conform to what’s natural for them, or if our fields don’t support the special characters or language they need.

• Errors shouldn’t shame anyone or be too cute. Many times our instinct is be deliver errors with an abundance of blame or dress them down to conform to our brand colors or voice. Both instincts are problematic.

I am so grateful to the inclusive design community for continuing to provide resources. I’ve started following more experts and would encourage you all to check out some of the insights that have helped our team.

Meet people where they are

There are things we can all do to proactively create experiences that avoid the ambiguity or complexity that lead to many common form errors. Committing to use plain language for labels and helper text is huge. We can also be flexible in how we accept their answers. Adam Silver always delivers concise tips for form design like this post on creating more intuitive form inputs.

When things go wrong, be consistent

Patterns can be used consistently to provide a smooth continuity of experience. Best practices include summarizing errors at the top of the page, clearly indicating the fields in error with more than color, and providing messaging on how to recover from the individual error in proximity to the field. Charlie Triplett delivers helpful lessons like this regularly.

Be concise and clear

Error messages live in this strange place buried in the tech stack and can escape your best practices when it comes to UX writing. Take the time to consider your tone of voice and avoid technical jargon, ambiguity, or alarming language. Focus on being instructive, clearly indicating the field in error and how to correct it. Jennifer Nadler Hochma covers all of this and more and would recommend you check out her article.

Something is bound to go wrong. As teams, we can share the responsibility of preventing issues when we can and provide thoughtful and consistent support when people naturally misunderstand something or simply mistyp .