Written by Matthew Bilyeu
on 

Please don’t disable paste

It’s tax season. I unfortunately had to log in to the Philadelphia Revenue Department’s website. There are a lot of things that could be said about the city’s web UX, but I’ll save those thoughts for now. What I want to share is a plea.

Please don’t disable paste. A pattern I saw and have seen on many bureaucratic sites is two fields like this:

With paste disabled on the second field. I guess that the developers don’t want users to paste a copied typo? But (A) I’m less likely to make a mistake if I’m copying and pasting data directly from another source, and (B) on the off chance the data is wrong, I’d rather pay the low probability price of a round trip for a backend error than the guaranteed price of tediously typing out some string. Or you could do client side mismatch detection.

With mobile browsers this becomes even more important since I can even copy text directly from photos of physical docs thanks to built-in OCR, and typing on the phone keyboard is especially annoying. Allowing paste is a small thing that can improve user experience cheaply.