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In an attempt to reduce to the very minimal the number of fields for a user to register to our services I am wondering whether to replace the fields company and email with only one "company's email". The assumption is that I could then work out the company from the email. so 

company: [....]
email:   [....]

becomes:

company's email: [....]

This of course means that a user can not register with his/her gmail or hotmail and so on. But I am okay with that.

Can somebody see any flaw in this approach ?

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  • Are you going to manually determine the company based on the host name? You could resolve the host name in a trivial manner but is this data intended to be used by a sales person down stream? I think this problem is more of a data quality issue rather than a UX quality issues. – Aaron McIver Dec 21 '11 at 16:23
  • Company name is often needed when sending physical mail; do you need Company for anything more than contact? Do you never need to refer to the user's company or contact the company directly? – Ben Brocka Dec 21 '11 at 16:28
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I can see some downsides:

  1. You are assuming he is indeed using a company email, what happens if he puts his personal email?
  2. You are also assuming you will be able to extract the correct name of the company1.

Having to hunt down the company email is time consuming, while having an extra field is not such an issue for the user. Moreover if you make it optional.

1. As an example, I work at Siamofirozi Sports, SL. My company email is @grupogranacom.com and I would usually put Supporterscup in the Company field.

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It depends what type of services your are providing, and how important it is to have the company details. Actually, there is nothing to stop someone registering with their gmail address, and you would then not know anything about the company. Or they could register with a trashmail.com email.

You cannot reliably extract information from an email address. That may be a flaw, depending on your requirements, but it looks like it may be an issue for you.

The other side of this is that it may encourage people to register with a generic email (info@abc.com), which may or may not be what you want.

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  • I think the OP was referring to stopping a registration from successfully occurring based on a RegEx pattern, perhaps client side and would avoid gmail, yahoo, etc... Not that they can't just because someone says they can't. – Aaron McIver Dec 21 '11 at 16:56
  • the "etc" makes this a major challenge. What if the company is, in fact, yahoo? Or a small company using gmail or suchlike for emails? – Schroedingers Cat Dec 21 '11 at 17:08
  • Agreed. Just pointing out possible mis-communication. – Aaron McIver Dec 21 '11 at 17:10

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