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Put the zip code first

zipcodefirst.com

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Re: Put the zip code first

#221

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

devman0 wrote: post #214
hyperbovine wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand either of these arguments. They both appear to reinforce the point made in the article. At worst a zip code contains multiple cities? Voila the city box becomes a dropdown. It’s 2025. JavaScript.

Even if a zip code contains multiple cities, each ZIP has one "preferred" locality name and you can default to that. Any of the locality names within a zip code is deliverable for all addresses in that zip code.

As has been pointed out in many other comments implicitly and explicitly, the purpose of a set of address fields in an HTML form is not always to come up with a USPS delivery address.

Re: Put the zip code first

#222

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Someone1234 wrote: post #95
ghostly_s wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. These are reasons you cannot deduce the Zip from the city, not the opposite. A ZIP+4 actually encodes all other information for a US address.

Nobody knows their +4 code. You cannot ask for information 90%+ of people won't have.

10% of the US population is 35 million people. That's a pretty weird version of "nobody".

Re: Put the zip code first

#223

Post by nine_k »

modeless wrote: post #37

> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompeten…

This is true, but in like 95% of cases, the ZIP code determines the state and the city (and the county, when it matters). Pre-populating them would save time to a lot of people.

Those few with the luck to live at zip codes that span cities and cross state borders would still still have to fill these in manually, like the 100% of us currently.

It's a pure improvement with no downsides, except the downside of slightly changing the 100-years-old sequence of address fields. Put the ZIP code first, and your customers are going to be happy with that.

Re: Put the zip code first

#224

Post by estebarb »

I tried to put my postal code and it wrongly assumed that I live in the United States.

The zip first suggestion seems that would be really inconvenient for around 95.8% of the world population.

Re: Put the zip code first

#225

Post by vscode-rest »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #212
vscode-rest wrote: post #192

I wonder if people had a similarly negative reaction when someone first proposed speculative execution in processor pipelines. “This is is a terrible idea, you’re telling me you will make 99% of cases way faster but completely ignore the 1% that will be slightly slower? Unbelievable.” If you have SA that most of your customers are in USA, this is a good idea. If not, maybe use your brain a bit and figure out if it ca…

I'm trying to work out what SA means.

Situational Awareness

Re: Put the zip code first

#226

Post by lacunary »

cvoss wrote: post #211
daft_pink wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just like to point out that the city field doesn’t necessarily prove anything because many unincorporated areas have a listed a city but may not be subject to the laws or taxes of a municipality. So having the correct city isn’t as useful as one thinks it is.

I used to live in just such a place. Went to the city center to apply for a library card, thinking "of course I can get a card here, I live in Foo City and this is the Foo City Public Library." I was asked for my street address, and she pulled out a binder of street names to check (yes it was analog, in the year 2016 A.D.). I was not within the city limits and was denied a card.

same thing happened to me last year, except at a brush drop-off rather than a library; analog binder and all!

Re: Put the zip code first

#227

Post by collingreen »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #222
Someone1234 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows their +4 code. You cannot ask for information 90%+ of people won't have.

10% of the US population is 35 million people. That's a pretty weird version of "nobody".

This is a bad hill to die on for a ux conversation. "10% can feel kind a big number when 100% is huge" is a funny argument, as is trying to be pedantic about "nobody knows" as a shortcut for "most people won't know and you can't rely on any particular user knowing". If 10% is big enough to matter I can't wait to tell you about 90%!

Re: Put the zip code first

#228

Post by collingreen »

Twey wrote: post #149
ghostly_s wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. These are reasons you cannot deduce the Zip from the city, not the opposite. A ZIP+4 actually encodes all other information for a US address.

ZIP+4? I think that's literally enough digits to give every house in the US (about 150,000,000 apparently) its own identifier.

Zip isn't uniformly distributed numbers though so you dont have the equivalent of that many digits of decimal numbers. Other comments have more detail but just for the top level example the first number is the zone and goes from 0 on the east coast to 9 on the west.

Re: Put the zip code first

#229

Post by chneu »

krater23 wrote: post #208
sph wrote: post #115

Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses: there are no other countries than the US of A, and if there are, they don’t really matter. This person bought a whole domain for something that doesn’t work for 90% of the world, claiming it does, never even testing their assumption. Great job!

He just doesn't understood that every country has his own zip codes. He just comes from the land of the free invention of units of measurement ;)

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