This is a continuation of my previous rant on mistakes web developers make that make forms unusable. Here are other things I’ve noticed, mostly about forms that need your address:

• Requiring a ‘middle name’. They’re not used in every country in the world.
• Having a broken country input. This, in my experience, has ranged from having only one country option (????), to doing something that will break the browser’s ability to skip to a particular option by typing the first letter. By the way, why do we even use select boxes for them in 2015? This is one of the things that you would be absolutely justified to use a jquery autocomplete box for (with a select polyfill if JS is disabled)
• Requiring a “state”. Most forms nowadays are smart enough to change the input depending on the country, but not everyone lives somewhere with states.
• AJAX submit flows without a loading indicator. Great, thanks for having me guess if your form is stuck, if I clicked the button wrong, or if I just need to wait because you didn’t do anything to indicate I’m waiting for an AJAX request.
• Purchase flows that don’t have a way to go back to the previous step or cancel on every single step. I saw this on a piece of software: “connecting to paypal” screen, something went wrong and the paypal window never opened, and I had no way to cancel and go back without closing the window and starting over.

So, what do you think? Am I, once again, just being grumpy? Should there be a part 3? 😀