Methods for tracking (422) validation errors to identify pain points

I've been circling around some thoughts from Tim McDonald's talk at Laracon, Laravel Precognition, and it got me thinking about the best practice to track validation errors to identify pain points?

What are you using or recommend? Would this be through front-end analytics, an exception tracker, or something else?

I would like to start identifying pain points in our applications before our users do-

Some examples:

Input Length Restrictions: Issues with character limits in text fields, either too short or excessively long.
Date Format Errors: Misunderstanding or misinput of the expected date format (e.g., DD/MM/YYYY vs MM/DD/YYYY).
File Upload Issues: Problems with uploading files, either due to size restrictions, format limitations, or user error in selection.
Address Verification Problems : Users enter addresses that don't match standard formats or can't be verified.
Captcha Challenges: Difficulties in successfully completing captchas, leading to frustration and abandonment of the task.

martinbean

2 years ago

Level 80

@ahinkle I guess it depends on how “noisy” you want your logs to be.

If I were to go down this route, then I’d look at hooking into ValidationException instances being thrown, and then log those requests to try and spot any patterns. I hook into this server-side so it captures regular, non-AJAX form submissions, rather than relying on front-end error tracking detecting 422 errors from AJAX requests.

I’d also log these as either info or notice level, as they are technically errors, but errors due to bad user input; not the application itself functioning incorrectly.

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