#8 Improved validation of open question responses

[Richard Mitchell]

"Currently, open questions are truly open. It would be desirable for more options to be available to the HCI researchers to limit the possible entries that can be made into the response text box of an open question. For example, when asking for a participant’s age, it would be sensible to restrict the possible entries to whole numbers and reduce the box to a single entry line. A more complex example would be verifying that a participant has entered a valid email address as a response. Using regular expressions could potentially solve these more complex cases of validation as well as providing parameters to adjust the size of and maximum number of characters allowed in a response box."

~ Mitchell, R. (2008)