The author complains about country selector drop-downs as part of the address flow, but if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States. I don't think there's a country-inferer from completely generic postal code tool out there yet, is there?
Put the zip code first
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Re: Put the zip code first
#12Unfortunately you still need country first. But past that, the point stands well. You'll need to adjust the form based on the country, obviously.
For the US you can use zip-5 to prefill bunch of data and zip+4 practically fills it all out for a lot of addresses.
Each country has some particular nuance though, so it's only as simple as "zip first" or "postcode first" in some locations.
Re: Put the zip code first
#13preach
Re: Put the zip code first
#14The author complains about country selector drop-downs as part of the address flow, but if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States. I don't think there's a country-inferer from completely generic postal code tool out there yet, is there?
You could maybe do it for some subset of countries, but it's not simple. And some countries don't have post codes.
Re: Put the zip code first
#15It’s easy enough to say “put the zip first because that will tell you city, state and country in one input”. What happens to customers not in the United States? They have no zip to enter. Or if they have a postal code of some stripe, it has a different format. What about folks who are in Turkmenistan, that you’re grumpy about having to scroll past? How are they signing up?
I think they can just skip the zip code entry and enter everything else as usual.
Re: Put the zip code first
#16Ok but that only fetches the codes from the US, so now a non-US resident will start with their zip code and end up with random ass place on the other side of the globe. Now not only I still have to fill in the fields, but also clear them first.
Obviously put country first, then whatever the equivalent of a ZIP code is second. In the UK, a post code gets you down to around 15-16 delivery addresses on average. No-one there really _ever_ needs to type an address.
“Obviously” didn’t read the article. Not having to pick the country is literally the premise!
“I type 90210. You now know I'm in Beverly Hills, California, United States. You didn't need me to tell you that. You didn't need a dropdown. You didn't need me to scroll past Turkmenistan.”
Re: Put the zip code first
#17Some zip codes cover multiple cities.
Yeah, but autofilling everything down to the neighboring city is still a huge improvement.
Re: Put the zip code first
#18I completely agree with the premise, but if we just ask for the ZIP code first and auto-fill the rest, how am I going to justify my 2-week sprint to build a custom, React-based, fuzzy-searchable, virtualized dropdown component for the 'State' field?
Just kidding xP
Re: Put the zip code first
#19I definitely agree in principle. But - without doxxing myself - I input my zip and the city is not correct. It’s a very close neighboring suburb (where the boundaries are definitely blurry) but it’s not the city on all the legal documents for my current house.
Zip code is a very powerful factor from a PII perspective.
https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/index.ht...
Re: Put the zip code first
#20I know some zips covers multiple cities. I would imagine some cross state lines in places too. Doesn’t cover multiple countries either as some have similar formats (5 digits). So there are edge cases that make this infeasible