Ajax call on form submission - MVC 5

The Goal:

Use an ajax call to either bring back information from database if the user supplied correct information, or if the user is a new user then it will return redirectToAction and send the user to another form. I want to do all of this using either parsley or bootstrap validator (I want to use these tools so that I can put the validator in the input and once I click on submit it will validate the form, but will not submit it. I also want it to have the same look, so the fields highlight similar to http://ift.tt/1n2mcVY The ajax call will handle the decision)

The problem: Here is a similar form:

<form action="" id="application">
First Name: <input type="text" name="first" required/>
Last Name: <input type="text" name="last" required/>

<button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

When one clicks on this form, if the user has not supplied the first and last name it will not submit the form.

What I want it to do is if the user has supplied this information it will not go to the action but will instead execute the ajax call and never submit the form from the button press similar to $(button).click(function (){//do stuff});(the ajax call will handle the submission, my guess here is that we can substitute this ajax call for any JavaScript function).

Finally: I have read about the e.preventdefault but it did not seem to work for me. How can I get the form to validate the inputs but never actually submit (unless the ajax allows it to). Can you give me an example of how I would do this? Or is this something that cannot be done? Should I do something similar to this Validate Form preventing form submission