680135 - Submit Feedback needs to provide better feedback when description char limit is exceeded.

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Paul]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0
Build ID: 20110811165603

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox 6.0.  Clicked on Help, Submit Feedback, Firefox Made Me Sad, entered description of problem, clicked Submit Feedback.


Actual results:

Even though the Submit Feedback button visibly depressed (it moved "down" a few pixels), nothing happened.  The page didn't change, there was no error message displayed, no tooltip was displayed when hovering over the button.


Expected results:

I realize now that this happened because my description exceeded the number of allowable keystrokes (140).  The page actually has a count-down of the number of available keystrokes left.  When you exceed 140, the counter goes negative and turns red, and the Submit Feedback button turns from green to grey.  HOWEVER, the button still acts as if it's active.  When you click it, it visibly "depresses" (it moves "down" a few pixels)  But no error message is displayed telling you why it's not working, nor is there a tooltip when you hover over the button telling you why it's disabled.  In the applications that I write, I always enable a tooltip when I disable a button, so that users can find out why it's disabled by hovering over it.  Yes, if I had noticed the counter had turned red that might have clued me in, but I didn't notice, and I think others might not notice either.

My enhancement suggestion:  When disabling the Submit Feedback button, add a tooltip to the button that describes why it's disabled (and, of course, remove the tooltip when re-enabling the button).  Also, if they actually Click the button when it's disabled, display a message box describing why it's disabled.

Comment 1

[jay garcia]

WFM, the resulting page is: http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/thanks

Comment 2

[Paul]

My "steps to reproduce" needs to be clarified:

Firefox 6.0.  Clicked on Help, Submit Feedback, Firefox Made Me Sad, entered description of problem ***that exceeded 140 characters***, clicked Submit Feedback.

Comment 3

[jay garcia]

(In reply to jay garcia from comment #1)
> WFM, the resulting page is: http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/thanks

It appeared at first that the focus of this bug was that the submit button didn't work regardless of the number of characters as is being reported in the Mozilla forum.

The 140 character limit, if exceeded, renders the button as grayed out and non-functional. I would assume this is by design as it is in many other forms as well.

Marking as NEW to see where this goes. Perhaps a better entry would have been as a RFE rather than an operational "bug".

Comment 4

[Paul]

When I created it I had thought that perhaps this should be an enhancement request rather than a bug, though I didn't quite see how to mark it as an enhancement.  At any rate, I decided it also qualified as a bug because the effect of the existing behavior is that users who try to submit feedback exceeding 140 characters are prevented from submitting that feedback, and they may not figure out why (as happened to me at first), and may abandon their effort, thus the feedback would be lost.  That is a lost opportunity for them, and for Firefox, and thus a "bad thing."  The question of whether users should be able to enter feedback longer than 140 characters is a different question, not addressed here.  But at least they should have the opportunity to shorten their feedback to the current limit in order to be able to submit it, and proper feedback from the submission page would encourage them to do that, rather than losing their feedback entirely.

Comment 5

[jay garcia]

Limiting the respons to 140 characters limits the amount of unnecessary chatter and spamming of the feedback process. Feedback that is to the point and concise is more apt to be read and considered. 

Take for instance this actual feedback that I received from one of the forms that I receive for Mozilla:

Get me OUT of 6.0 please? It has removed ALL my add-ons and the Add-On Manager never loads. I'm sick of auto updates which are NOT improvements.

Exactly 140 charachters and right to the point. IMHO it was enough, any more would be a senseless rant.