71–80 of 150 posts
I read this article a long time ago and I took it seriously. So instead of asking for address, postal/zip code, city, state/province, I just put up a big text area labeled "Full address" so that people have complete freedom about what to fill in. 80% of the users ended up only filling in their street address, not their postal/zip code, city and state/province, even though they're from countries where (most?) addresse…
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This is where most of the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles fall flat. The thing to do is not try to design a single form that accommodates every possible address or name or whatever. The thing to do is examine your use case, design a form that works for, say, 99.9% or more of the people you want it to reach, and then if you really want to get the last 0.1% have someone who can do customer service and has acc…
"Punt and let customer support handle it" is a pretty lazy solution, in my view. Additionally, what a developer might think of as a "99.9%" solution is more often than not a 99% solution, or a 90% solution. With enough customers, dealing with everyone who can't use your slapped-together form will be more expensive than doing it right. Software doesn't become great by assuming someone else will handle the edge cases a…
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even using GPS coordinates How can GPS coordinates be ambiguous? I can see different units of measure/notations being used, and the accuracy might be a problem for extremely close addresses, but wasn't it the point of GPS to provide an exact reference for any point on the planet?
GPS coordinates don't generally include altitude, correct? If he's in a six-floor apartment, how could GPS define which floor he's in?
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It was a form for signing an agreement. If they don't fill in their full address then the contract may not be legally binding.
Simple clerical errors rarely invalidate a contract. I'm not a lawyer though so I don't actually know. I would have done address line 1, address line 2, line3, etc. I think people got confused by your form because they are used to typing in 1234 Sample Street expecting to be asked the rest of the information further down. The other option would be on form submit to show what they have put in and say "make sure this i…
We need a name for this.
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Simple clerical errors rarely invalidate a contract. I'm not a lawyer though so I don't actually know. I would have done address line 1, address line 2, line3, etc. I think people got confused by your form because they are used to typing in 1234 Sample Street expecting to be asked the rest of the information further down. The other option would be on form submit to show what they have put in and say "make sure this i…
Don't know about the US, but here in the UK having an incorrect address in a contract may make it trickier to enforce a court decision against a company as certain kinds of documents used in the court process are only valid if served to the Registered Office of the company.
Really, I am no legal expert but I did once sue someone in small claims court. They wanted to know what I did to verify the other party's address, not just taking their word for it.
A falsehood only distantly alluded to: That people have addresses at all, or can describe their residence in an unambiguous or clear way (even using GPS coordinates). I used to live in a place I couldn't even remotely give directions to. It was deep within a neighborhood of a poorer country, none of the streets had names, none of the buildings are numbered. I lived in an building where none of the apartments had numb…
Furthermore, just because you don't have an address doesn't mean you can't receive mail! At least as recently as a few decades ago, there were rural communities in the US where nobody had a street address; the postal service knew where everybody lived and would deliver mail given just a name and town. I'm not sure whether this arrangement still exists in the US, but I'm pretty sure it still does in Ireland and probab…
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Bad mistake you get a metric fuck ton of shit in your data that way. You should always police your input data properly one big text field is lazy programming that leads to a big technical debt later on. And yes that does mean handling apostrophes and all those other edge cases properly.
Name of recipient, state/province/etc., postal code and country, maybe. But for the rest, that bit (at least in the UK) that goes in the middle... what policing can you do? That part is just a text blob. You can't do much meaningful with it except for showing it to somebody (e.g., on a label affixed to the package you're sending) and have them figure it out.
The blob has been tamed to 1-2 lines, and you're probably best off giving 'line 1' 'line 2' 'line 3' fields. At this point the chance of confusion is minimal, even if you can't validate very well.
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Bad mistake you get a metric fuck ton of shit in your data that way. You should always police your input data properly one big text field is lazy programming that leads to a big technical debt later on. And yes that does mean handling apostrophes and all those other edge cases properly.
Name of recipient, state/province/etc., postal code and country, maybe. But for the rest, that bit (at least in the UK) that goes in the middle... what policing can you do? That part is just a text blob. You can't do much meaningful with it except for showing it to somebody (e.g., on a label affixed to the package you're sending) and have them figure it out.
I once spent the best part of a day tracking down a problem with a single bad address for a major UK directory some how some one had entered an address in Egypt in Arabic.