A Newsletter Sign Up Form That Cost Me a Job

I had an interview for a position as a frontend web developer and part of the interview process was a coding challenge where I was asked to create an newsletter sign up form. I had 30 minutes to do it and I was expected to have a working form that looked good and used some JavaScript and jQuery to handle form events as well as any other added features. Well, as you may have guessed by the title of this article, the sign up form I created was less than impressive and I got an email two days later saying how I didn’t get the job.

Here is what the newsletter sign up form I created looked like:

The crummy sign up form

It is a very barebones form and I actually wasn’t able to get the JavaScript working to get the form to submit properly. I tried to have the form show a thank you message after the sign up button was clicked, but that couldn’t be tested out since I wasn’t able to handle the form submit event.

After the fact, I went ahead and built another newsletter sign up form and this is what it looks like:

The new and improved sign up form

I know, it looks quite plain, but it does have some neat features upon form submission! Here is a GIF showing the complete sign up process:

As you can see, the form actually does stuff upon form submission! It first hides the initial form elements and then displays a spinner to represent the time it might take to send the data to a server. After a couple seconds, a checkmark appears inside the spinner and then a thank you message appears with the inputted name on the sign up form.

It’s hard to tell if that would have gotten me the job, but it probably would have helped with my chances. Also, that form took a bit more time than 30 minutes to setup…

You can try out the signup form for yourself here:

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