Functioning Form has a great article about Flexible Web Forms. One of the barriers of the web is when someone hits a web form, there’s usually some kind of constraint over how the information is entered (required, the format, the price of tea in China, that kind of stuff). He covers phone numbers, and in many cases for my clients, capturing the information in any format they can get it is much more important than making sure the number is formatted correctly, and spending hours overthinking the user experience.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact