Put the zip code first

Im reading through all these comments and it amazes me how the perfect is the enemy of the good, for many computer people.

Ofc there are edge cases. So since there exist a handful of edge cases where a zip code maps to two states, or the more frequent (but irrelevant in the US) case of two or more city names per zip code, we should make everyone suffer?

Ofc if you are making a web form you should ask for the zip code first, and auto complete state and city. Let the user edit them if they don’t like what you chose. Or do as some have suggested here and present the official USPS data as a drop down of 2 states or 2-3 cities; thats way better than having to type all of it.

And I curse everyone who thinks it’s a good idea to break zip code or phone number or OTP into multiple fields, or if you’re too lazy to set the input type to number.

Many other comments here have outlined the problems with what TFA appears to consider "sane defaults".

But sure, if you can do it right (e.g. "Put the country first"), then by all means do so!

At least detect my country by IP range and put "US" at the top of the country dropdown.

Just make sure it works well with autocomplete. No additional fanciness or weird rearranging of fields is needed.

Yes, it is US-centric. You all act like that many commercial websites are just like automatically doing international business. I am not even allowed to do business out of my state. I don't even need that filled in. You can see my website anywhere, but you can't be my client unless you're in my state. So I don't care.

Any company able to do business in multiple jurisdictions, well, that's just the kind of extra thing they can handle.

For an enormous amount of sites and for an enormous amount of users this is an improvement and the general reaction here is nitpicking and this self-evident charge that it's US-centric. So what. The principle would apply in most places.

In Costa Rica, there are no addresses but there are (now) post codes. You would have to take that into account to do business there. If this doesn't apply to you then it doesn't apply to you.

It's not like the internal US market is small. This solves a problem for a lot of people in a lot of cases.