Why do sites ask you to confirm your email address when registering? It makes no sense to me and is an annoying extra step in the registration process.
If I make a typo when entering my email address initially, I am more than likely going to copy and paste the mistake into the confirm field thereby negating any benefits of having this confirmation step.
If the site wants to be sure you are entering your email address correctly, then ensure that the setup involves emailing the account details. No details received? Then you check what email details you entered.
Make signups as painless as possible for potential users – it is criminal to lose people at this point in the proceedings.
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To the annoyance of whoever is sitting beside me while form filling; it’s a question I’ve been asking for years. Copy and paist is what I end up doing half of the time. Then again I’ve started a bad habit of spelling gmail.com as ‘gamil.com’.
Savvy users generally copy and paste, non-savvy users generally don’t. Guess which ones are more susceptible to typos?
dahamsta summed it up quite nicely. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a new member on your site with an obvious spelling error in their email address and you know they never got their password. Actually, even more frustrating is to have two new members – one with a misspelled email address and another, obviously the same person, with the correct one.
>>No details received? Then you check what email details you entered.
If the email address is the username, as it is in many systemes, how do you check the details if you’ve no way to recover them?