Cultural Norms and Web Forms

I share an office suite with some old coworkers of mine in downtown Tyler and one of them is a talented Frontend Web / WordPress developer named Robbie. Recently we were talking about a project he was doing some frontend and UI work for that had an interesting twist. Robbie was working with developers in India who are building out a major web application, but he noticed that on several web forms in the application the devs had form validation triggering onKeyup, whereas the standard is usually onBlur.

For those who are unaware, there are a million ways in Javascript to do form validation and tons of packages to help with it. In Javascript, there are many events that drive the user interface on the web. For any type of input, you can put an event handler on the input to trigger some Javascript function. OnKeyup triggers a function when the user removes their finger from a particular key. OnBlur however is triggered when an input loses focus.

Robbie was confused that the developers would use OnKeyup because then every keypress the user would be blasted with a validation message. “YOU DIDN’T DO THIS RIGHT! RETYPE THIS! INPUT NOT CORRECT!” is somewhat annoying when you haven’t finished what you are typing yet. It makes more sense to display a message like that after you finish your whole input (in onBlur). But that is where the conversation got far more interesting! Because India has a very different culture than the US. In India, people are very competitive, they also honk their horns all the time! We wondered if perhaps it is culturally acceptable to have form validation onKeyup instead of onBlur because Indian culture is far more emotionally expressive than US culture.

From the Culture Map

I bet there are all sorts of things done on the web that are designed based around US / Western culture that don’t necissarily make sense in the rest of the world. As developers working internationally can attest there are all sorts of norms that are different between cultures. In this particular case, it turned out the developers in India had made a mistake and were planning to use onBlur all along. But that still begs the question, are there cultural forms for web forms?