It’s commonplace to see a form on a website; some are truly awful, some, believe it or not, can actually be a pleasant experience. But most have some method of validation on them and in my experience, checking this validation is something teams look to automate. It makes sense: populate a few fields, or leave them empty, click submit, and ensure the correct validation is delivered by the site. These are positive and negative scenarios.

Recently though, I was thinking about the form validation automation I have done in the past, and questioning its effectiveness. In my opinion, validation errors and message are there to talk to the user, to help and guide them into being able to complete your form. This is most commonly done using the colour red. Field, labels, error text, popups and messages tend to be all subject to being coloured red. It was this use of red that had me question my normal approach to creating automated checks for form validation.

Now, I’m no UX (User Experience) expert, but happen to know some very good designers. I asked them, why do we use red? It fairly obvious really, it’s a colour we all associate with stopping and damage. This is backed up in the Microsoft design guidelines: Read more…