As we exported a list of voucher codes today, we were shocked, because the list was completely empty. There were only two users that seemed to have entered a code, but there were just the first two digits saved.

We've searched with two persons for about 45 minutes for that bug, because we guessed that there'd be an error while saving the other parts of the code - but despite of which special cases we tried: Everything just worked fine.

After several tests we just went to the page itself and wanted to check if there'd also work everything - but it became obvious: It just was a matter of the design :-D

The place were the voucher codes should be inserted just contained two UNLABELED textboxes. Something like this:

The problem that occured, caused by the design, was: The left box was intended to carry the code, while the right box just should take some kind of location information (e.g. a zip or something like that) which allowed every value you entered. Because the voucher code seems to be writte with a dash, or simply just because there was no information about what to insert into the second box, the potential customers splitted the code into both fields. That caused an error in the validation, which could only be resolved, if you deleted both fields. (The reason why the first value was saved is: We didn't clean up the value, if you just entered nothing). Obviously most of the people have tried just stopped trying it after some errors ... or even left the page. That's the reason why we just got the two incomplete codes.

Note: You shouldn't assume that the people which visit your page have the same thoughts as you had when you created the page (after you thought about that for several weeks during the layout period) ;-)

Appendix: Something I forgot to say - the design was created by the customer himself.