[Sigia-l] Cross posting: Phone number layout

[Jenn Coonce]

When asking for a site visitor's contact information, I've seen two
different ways of asking for the phone number field. One is to have one
field where users can type in all 10 digits (the best design is where they
can choose whether to add hyphens or not).

The other way is to have 3 boxes -- one for the first 3 numbers, one for the
second 3, and one for the last 4.  I've been talking to my fellow team
members about whether the cursor should automatically jump to the next field
when the user fills the field with numbers

It seems advanced users dislike the feature of the cursor automatically
jumping because they automatically hit tab and the curser is moved to the
wrong field. My guess is that less sophisticated users would prefer the
cursor to automatically jump.

So this leads me to:

Why even three fields for the phone number? Should there just be one field
or is there a good reason for having three? If three, then which is
preferable? Jumping automatically or waiting for the user to move the
cursor?

Thanks,
Jenn Coonce
Senior Information Architect, DVC Worldwide