A nice little old-school moment from Flickr: When you accidentally type the name of the new photo album in the search field instead of the “new album name” field, Flickr just passes on that value to save you from having to retype it:

(I bet you witness a version of this all the time when dealing with “I forgot my password” flows which should pass on your login from one field to another, but they don’t.)

I’m not saying this dialog is beyond reproach; one way to reduce this problem would be to make those two treatments different enough visually to reduce the chance of confusion. But it doesn’t matter, because the truth is that often there is no dividing line between the problems and the symptoms, and both overlap to a scary degree.

As a designer, I think it’s sometimes good to simply face this truth: no matter what I do, the user might type something into a wrong field. Anything I can do to help then?