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Dear American Website Owner

jan.rychter.com

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Re: Dear American Website Owner

#91

Post by rohsh »

jwr wrote: post #65

I should probably clarify something, given how heated the discussion is becoming. I could have written the same thing as a nerdy techie article, pointing out flaws in input validation. Do you think this would have gotten my point across? How many people would have read that article? Would it have made it to Hacker News? Look: this is not a rant about Americans. It just so happens that US has developed most of the int…

I think on some level this is a rant about Americans, even if you didn't intend it to be one. My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do. I would bet money on the same being true for Brazilians and Australians. I would bet money on Japanese people being aware of the fact that not every country is partitioned into prefectures.

Maybe this is because Indians, Germans etc. are not socialized to see their way of running a nation as the only way, at least not in the way Americans are. Maybe not. In any case it's a nice demonstration of how collective cultural ignorance leads to annoyed visitors and, one might presume, lost sales.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#92

Post by Vivtek »

petercooper wrote: post #52
Vivtek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? Edit on second thought: how about the vast majority of forms of this nature, which have a helpful dropdown list of the fifty valid states, and sometimes DC for the District of…

How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? "State" is really just equivalent to "second-level subdivision" (a bit like how "ZIP code" can mean "postal code" in general, as long as the box allows freeform input). Most c…

They do if you want to receive mail. Puerto Rican municipalities have nothing whatsoever to do with mailing addresses (and in fact the situation is worse, since many PR addresses include an "urbanization").

Moreover, Indiana has counties that correspond to Puerto Rican municipalities. Drawing this sort of specious parallel is entertaining, to be sure, but doesn't help people place orders.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#93

Post by jasonlotito »

tghw wrote: post #87
jwr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to write a blog post which elaborated on all possible internationalization issues, it would become a PhD dissertation and take a year to write. And then it wouldn't even touch on all the issues. You have to start somewhere — and let's face it, dealing with the two silly problems I mentioned would get us 80% of the way there.

I gave it a shot of my own. I didn't do all the permutations, and surely left out big swaths that I've never even thought of, but it's a start... http://hicks-wright.net/blog/stupid-american-website-owners/

I wrote about Credit Card forms a while back as well.

http://www.jasonlotito.com/programming/what-i-know-about-des...

Anyways, you mention in your post:

"Making something a simple form that is fully internationalized and has useful validation is no where near as easy as they would like us to believe."

It's not easy, but it's not as time consuming and as difficult as you think it is. Getting the phone numbers right doesn't take years. A week is all you need from design to testing, and you are done.

Postal Codes are easy as well, considering their are numerous services that allow you to verify the Postal Code to the address. However, even taking something as simple as the common case, a user from the US entering a 6 digit code has probably made an error, and that solves a common problem.

House numbers and other addresses never presented a significant problem. I've seen more problems with not accepting different encodings then with the actual input.

And why is this important, even if you just want to serve an American audience? Because not every American lives in the US. Consider just the Armed Services, stationed all over the world.

No.

If you don't want to do it, that's fine. But don't complain that it's too much work or not worth it.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#94

Post by WingForward »

kpanghmc wrote: post #78
Deestan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too! I've been arguing this for years, and I have yet for someone to reply with a good reason why it shouldn't be handled this way. Bad reasons given: - Safeguard against users who can't be relied on to format their own address properly. Fix 1: Don't worry about that. Fix 2: If you really want this, leave the rest of us an option to use a freeform address instead. - "Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Ch…

There are several legitimate reasons for requiring users to enter in their address in separate fields. The two main ones are: 1. If you need to integrate with third party systems who require you to break up the address. In case you've never tried, parsing addresses is very hard -- if not impossible -- depending on how many formats you need to support. All it takes is one third party library that requires you to break…

Is parsing the addresses on the back end harder than providing the same number of support formats on the front end?

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#95

Post by aasarava »

zeeone wrote: post #53
njharman wrote: post #45

I've argued many times for making address one big text field. Let people who live in the country, who own the address, format it how they know it should be formatted.

Which would make so much more sense in the first place. I don't even know why did they make them in separate fields in the first place. To give you a huge listbox of all states to choose from?! Oh, wow!

That huge listbox of states is designed to normalize the incoming data so that you don't end up with address in California that use "Ca", "CA", "Calif." and "California" -- or any number of misspellings that users are prone to input.

Sure, there are other ways to normalize an address from freetext input, but they often require using a third party system from FedEx or UPS.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#96

Post by pyre »

Goosey wrote: post #84
kpanghmc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several legitimate reasons for requiring users to enter in their address in separate fields. The two main ones are: 1. If you need to integrate with third party systems who require you to break up the address. In case you've never tried, parsing addresses is very hard -- if not impossible -- depending on how many formats you need to support. All it takes is one third party library that requires you to break…

Are there any promising open source libraries to fill this niche? Or startups offering it as a service API? Honestly this seems like a problem that could be solved once and we all would benefit... And like any good problem, there is probably a profit to be made from it.

It seems like it would make it that much easier if it were a text box and a country selection (rather than just a text area, so you can reliably know the country). Since most countries that I'm familiar with have a limited number of ways of representing an address. The larger variation seems to be between address formats of different countries.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#97

Post by tghw »

jasonlotito wrote: post #93
tghw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave it a shot of my own. I didn't do all the permutations, and surely left out big swaths that I've never even thought of, but it's a start... http://hicks-wright.net/blog/stupid-american-website-owners/

I wrote about Credit Card forms a while back as well. http://www.jasonlotito.com/programming/what-i-know-about-des... Anyways, you mention in your post: "Making something a simple form that is fully internationalized and has useful validation is no where near as easy as they would like us to believe." It's not easy, but it's not as time consuming and as difficult as you think it is. Getting the phone numbers right do…

Of course I exaggerate in the post, you're right that it'll probably take just a week to get coded up. (Which means three weeks, the way development often goes.)

The question is whether or not that time is well spent, or if I would be better off using that time to improve whatever product/service the form is attached to. Especially when you're on a lean (i.e. startup) budget, the decision becomes pretty clear.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#98

Post by pyre »

Retric wrote: post #63
zeeone wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would make so much more sense in the first place. I don't even know why did they make them in separate fields in the first place. To give you a huge listbox of all states to choose from?! Oh, wow!

While accepting generic address is nice, if you actually use the address for anything actually knowing the Country and Zip+4 for the US gives you a lot of power for things like advertizing campaigns. Also, the chances of a user entering bad data when given an unformatted field increased dramatically. My suggestion is to give the option to enter generic information but don't let that become the default.

Or:

* allow the user to enter a free-form address, normalize it and then prompt the user for confirmation that the normalization was correct.

* Allow the user to edit fields on the confirmation page.

* Log any differences between the normalization and what the user changes for further refinement of the normalization process.

* Don't require fields that may not be relevant to all addresses that you plan to capture.

* Allow some sort of contact avenue on the address confirmation page so that they can complain when the interface doesn't allow them to properly enter their address. (If people hit a brickwall while trying to submit their address, they are more likely to just give up if they have to hunt down contact information. At the very least, if there is an easy way for them to complain, you get some sort of feedback even if you lose them as a customer.)

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#99

Post by barrkel »

raganwald wrote: post #11
snitko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use any pattern? Let me enter the phone number in a way I got used to it and deal with it.

There's a cost/benefit analysis to be done. People do make mistakes, and checking their submission against common patterns will save you lost sales. As suggested in a comment on a rant I wrote a few years ago, one strategy is to 'validate' against something reasonable, but instead of rejecting anything that fails, ask the user to confirm that they really do want something unexpected. I'm not sure that 'reasonable' wo…

Confirmation is OK, but taking a hard line is a no-no. I've had endless problems trying to jam my Irish mobile phone number (for a long time, my primary phone) into UK phone number fields.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#100

Post by josefresco »

jwr wrote: post #57
Vivtek wrote: post #26

Dear German Website Owner (yeah, this works both ways) I do have a state in my postal address, and if I have to enter my address as 47374 Richmond instead of Richmond IN 47374, it will probably go to Virginia first, and maybe they'll get it to me eventually. Just saying. Internationalism is hard. If you want to go for the global market, it would behoove you to try to do it right.

Absolutely — which is I would recommend providing multi-line edit boxes for addresses. That way you can enter your address any way you see fit. You really know best how to address mail so that it gets to you, why would I want to pretend I know better?

Yeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.
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