Adobe: The Phone Number field does not match the pattern ^[0-9 \.,/\-\(\)\+]*$. · 203 words posted 04/05/2006 07:13 AM

While trying to update my customer account at Adobe I got the following error message:

The Phone Number field does not match the pattern ^[0-9 \.,/\-\(\)\+]*$.

I’m pretty handy with Regular Expressions and I still couldn’t get Adobe to accept my phone number. It’s a textbook example of bad error handling: written by programmers for programmers.

What’s more, there are several form fields for phone numbers and the error message is nowhere close to the offending field. Good error handling on the web follows two guidelines:

Error handling runs with a company’s culture. Some companies get it, others don’t. Macromedia got it: ColdFusion makes it easy to write form validation routines that help people recover from mistakes. Validation in Flash forms couldn’t be better: here’s an example from the Macromedia account login page. The field in question is highlighted, the error message is close to the error, and the language in the message isn’t technical.

Here’s hoping some of Macromedia’s best practices rub off on Adobe.

For more on error handling on the web, see Defensive Design for the Web from 37signals.

* * *


1. On Apr 5, 08:45 AM barry.b said:
so I wasn’t the only one caught out today?

Their support must have got quite a few emails. a bit of an unfortunate faux pas it seems… #

2. On Apr 5, 09:37 AM christopher said:
well, the regular expression was accurate. the problem – which i figured out only after trying to change my phone number’s formatting multiple times – is that the error was referring to the fax number field which defaulted to “NULL”. This could have been avoided if, as you said, the error message was next to the offending field.

I would also question the user friendlyness (and potentially security) of showing the user the actual regular expression. #