I just ran into yet another form on a web page that looked like this:
These things drive me nuts. Once I’ve typed my email address in the first time, I just type Shift-Home to highlight the entire field, Ctrl-C to copy, then tab to the next field and paste it in. That’s still four more keystrokes than I should have to bother with.
Why do we never see forms like this?
Why not just make the user confirm everything? What’s so special about email addresses that we have to type them twice?
My simple answer: nothing. Don’t do this. The only reason password fields have a second “confirm” field is that password fields mask the input, so the user can’t see what they’re typing.