Error flows: help me understand what I did wrong

An error isn’t a fun thing for a user to see.

If you’re filling in a form and you miss out a field, you’ll get an error saying “This field is required”. The error might even tell you which field is required - even better.

It’s clear what went wrong, and what you need to do to solve the issue.

It’s also fairly low friction, as the user is already on the page and can quickly correct their error.

What’s not so good is when you submit something, and you have to wait for a response to find out if it was accepted or rejected.

This is a flow that you go through when submitting music for distribution via Soundcloud for Artists.

Submit - Wait - Fail

Here’s an error I got recently when submitting a track for distribution.

This comes through as an email, likely because a human needs to check this.

When I clicked through to edit the release, the same error greeted me on the Soundcloud for Artists website.

However, that’s quite a few fields I might have filled out incorrectly - and the form doesn’t tell me which one I’ve got wrong.

Using a different track as an example, here’s the part of the form I need to check.

It took me forever to realise that the inclusion of “Mr” is tripping up the validation.

But it doesn’t trip up the validation on the Soundcloud for Artists website. It must be using different validation after I submit.

What’s annoying is these fields are also pre-filled from a previous release.

And I’ve also come across this error before for this exact reason - but I completely forgot about it, because this is a process I only go through at most once a month.

It feels like the validation on the web form and the email could align a bit better. As it stands, I found it pretty confusing, and I also raised a support ticket before I realised how to fix it myself.

At least I hope I’ve fixed it. I submitted again - I don’t yet know if it’s gone through.

Ah well.