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Consider the following scenario for a form with two fields "Full name" and "email".

When user starts editing the "Full name" field I will not allow user to start editing "email" field until "Full name" conforms to something like "at least two titleized words consisting only of latin letters".

Is it a good practice to force user enter correct data into field? By "forcing" I mean do not allow progress to other entry fields until the first one is filled correctly.

Update As @Jeroen pointed out this enforces the certain order for filling in the fields. As to my scenario - I have no preference over the order of filling in fields. It's just that if user started editing email, he/she won't progress anywhere else if email field is not filled correctly. To sum it all up: user can start with any field, but progress only when that field is filled correctly.

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  • This comes down to requiring the user to fill in your form in a specific order. Can you explain why you'd prefer that? – Jeroen Nov 30 '11 at 17:04
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    How would you even prohibit them from progressing to another field? In general 'forcing' anything up on a user is bad UX. – DA01 Nov 30 '11 at 18:04
  • In the iOS environment you can prohibit user from dismissing the keyboard if the required text field does not pass validation. – Eimantas Nov 30 '11 at 18:28
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    Do you really think you can write rules to account for every possible valid customer names? Not everyone has two names. Some people have hyphens, or apostrophes, or Unicode characters. Some names don't start with a capital letter. – Jon of All Trades Jun 15 '12 at 21:42
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This is clearly not a proper way of doing. You should disable the validation button and indicate to the user the wrong fields and some hint to fill them properly. Two of the core principles of UX are to stay out of the way of the user and to use constraints wisely. Here you are in one transaction that ends when the user validates the whole form. Help him fill the form but don't restrict him.

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