I don’t often write about UX failures, but one thing that keeps coming up is the handling of IBANs in checkout processes.
You would think that there’s nothing special about entering an IBAN into a web form: Form, enter IBAN, submit. Well … I keep noticing two things/problems:
Since IBANs are usually quite long, they are often broken up into human-readable 4-digit chunks. The IBAN “IE64IRCE92050112345678” is then displayed as “IE64 IRCE 9205 0112 3456 78” This could be done via CSS SPANs, but usually simple spaces are used to separate the chunks. – So, when you copy/paste such an IBAN, you also copy the spaces.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem, if some checkout forms didn’t try to validate a pasted IBAN and sometimes simply refuse to accept a string with spaces (or violating the 34-character limit)! I mean – would it be such a problem to paste-and-remove-whitespaces? Or at least: just paste and mark it as invalid. But simply refusing to insert is really the worst solution.
I often cancelled my checkout on mobile and came back to it later. I just found it too cumbersome to copy and paste multiple chunks.