Submitting my online council tax payment last week, I made a mistake. Instead of specifying £63.00 in a freetext payment field (about $100USD), I missed the dot and am now poorer by £6,300 (about ten thousand dollars in US terms). I received no obvious warning until I checked my bank account, one week later.
I'm currently waiting for my refund request, but in the meanwhile, it has me thinking - is there a suitable solution for preventing this kind of thing happening to others?
Answer
Put the pence (the decimals) in a separate field and only accept whole numbers in the two edit fields (pounds and pence). If the user hits the decimal separator key in the pounds field, then move focus to the pence field.
In addition to preventing errors during editing, one should also let the user confirm the values in a different screen/layout. If you just ask a user to confirm the input he just entered, the chance for detecting errors is lower than if you present the values back to the user in a slightly different way.
Enter value:
Confirm value:
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