Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers

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Using <input type="text" inputmode="numeric" pattern="[0-9]*"> allows for a degree of separation between how the user enters data (“input mode”), what the browser expects the user input to contain (type equals number), and potentially how it tries to validate it.

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I’ve sung the praises of the GDS research team before, and it’s for things like this that I respect them the most: they’re knowing for taking a deep-dive user-centric approach to understanding usability issues, and they deliver valuable actionable answers off the back of it.

If you’ve got Web forms that ask people for numbers, this is how you should be doing it. If you’re doing so specifically for 2FA purposes, see that post I shared last month on a similar topic.