How to direct people to fill out a form

Question

What is the best way to get people to fill out a form correctly? For instance I originally had a "Name" field on a form and I want 1 person per form. People filled it out like this: "Mark & Becky Newsman". So I broke it into 2 fields, "First Name" and "Last Name", And people are still filling it out wrong, like "First Name" = "Mark & Becky", "Last Name" = "Newsman".

Are there any recommendations on how better to get people to understand that only one person's name should go there? I currently have it on two lines, would it work better to put both fields on one line?

If this is on the wrong site go ahead and move it to the correct site.

Answer 1

There is no solution to users' stupidity.

Barring that, make fields as obvious as possible and perform data validation* and give the user feedback as to what is filled out correctly and what isn't.

If the two name fields are for different roles (ex.: Bride, Groom) label them as such, or if you find a common mistake just put a gentle reminder such as:

Name:            ___________
(one per field)  ___________

But no matter what you do, someone will always manage to fill the whole thing with malformed, garbage or even malicious input. Just be able to gracefully handle incorrect input.

Answer 2

Perhaps you could validate the input data, looking for things that have no place in a person's name like "&", "/" and the string " and ", and if you see that warn the user that the field is for one person only?

Answer 3

Another suggestion is to make it obvious that they will be given another form for the other person (if any). Maybe some users thought they wouldn't get a second form and that's why they tried to cram the information in there?