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by kartickv
2770 days ago
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I take your point about usability as opposed to visual design, and that many slick-looking UIs actually lower productivity. But: In this example, unless not handling international phone numbers leads to failure of the project, that can be handled later, say once the project is approved and time estimation is being done. If I'm building a notes app, and someone is proposing a new sign up form to increase conversions, and it has a phone number field, handling international numbers is the last thing to worry about at this stage (unless international numbers are a significant problem with the old form leading to abandonment). We shouldn't doom good ideas with irrelevant details, which are absolutely relevant later, but not now. Product development happens in phases of increasing fidelity, and issues need to be brought up at the appropriate time, not too early, not too late. |
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Imo this is one of those things best left unhandled, eg. "just use a plain mostly unvalidated textfield, and throw and error only when you want to use that data via another system like for a text message campaign". Mostly in real-life if you want to target the entire freaking planet (not just 99% of phone using people, but 99.999%), you'll get to realize that any validation is not enough and that some phone numbers need to contain arbitrary letters and symbols in them (better don't ask... the world is big and weird :P), and that yeah, those numbers will not be procesable by things like Twillio, but human users with local knowledge will know how to actually "dial" them...
But it needs to be a conscious decision, to consciously choose to not-validate and to understand that you give up the ability to 100% target phone numbers for things like 2-factor-auth later on.
Not "forget that phone numbers need to be validated" and then, go and say, "oh, let's do phone-based 2-fa mandatory" or whatever user interaction messup like that.