Mail a friend C70003

Description

A form that can be sent by a website’s visitor to recommend specific content, or the website as a whole, to one or multiple ‘ friends’. The form asks for contact details, with some fields required and some fields left open.

Context of use

This form can be used, whenever a user might wish to share website content (or the website as a whole) with other persons.

How it works

Some information is mandatory in a ‘mail a friend’ form. The person who sends the form to the recipient, needs to identify himself by providing his name and e-mail address. Naturally, the e-mail address of the recipient is required information as well, otherwise we would not know whom to send the message to. To personalize the sent information, it is necessary to provide the recipient’s name also. It is important to communicate clearly in text (Fields with * are mandatory) and visually (mark the significant fields with an asterisk symbol) which fields are required. Fields like ‘send me a copy of this message’ or a text field, are additional fields (e.g. a sender may choose to type a personal message to his friend).

The sender has to press a button to submit the form. When the form does not validate, he will see an error message above the related field. This error message never just warns the user, but its main purpose is to offer guidance to successfully send the form (e.g. ‘Please fill in the recipient’s e-mail address to successfully send this message’).

When all criteria have been met, the recipient (or multiple recipients; note: one is never notified when a message is sent to other recipients as well) receives an e-mail, most likely with their friend’s name and e-mail address, personal message and link to the recommended content. The text in the e-mail looks like: “Dear [name recipient], [name sender] thought you might like the information on this page (or: website) (this links to a specific url). When you are not able to view the content of the link, please paste the following URL in your browser: HYPERLINK “http://www.titlesite.com/mainmenu/submenu” http://www.titlesite.com/mainmenu/submenu. Please contact [name sender] via [e-mail address sender]. With kind regards, [team or contact person of company] http://www.titlesite.com”