261–270 of 330 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 1000 times. I’ve tried implementing what OP has mentioned, and quickly learned it isn’t possible. A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. So, to be safe, you have to enter city, state, and zip.
> A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. Sure but a zip code belongs to only one city and one state, right?
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.
I get the vibe that it's more like there's unexpected complexity and it's difficult to be confident you know how zipcodes work with enough detail to make the feature work. And that is just one example of possible complexity. Do zipcodes change for example? Can your drop-down quickly go out-of-date? You'd need a way to manually enter a city so people are able to tell the system an address. Do you want to bother making…
What kind of app are you building? Maybe you're selling something. You probably want users to get through your check out form as fast as possible before they change their mind or get distracted or frustrated.
Or you're building an app for data entry and people are filling in lots of addresses every day. They would appreciate you saving them time.
Either way, spending a day or two to polish up your form can be worth a lot.
Not saying its trivial to get all the edge cases right, but I'm pretty sure we can do better here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The postcode doesn't tell the whole story. But what you can do is use an IP geolocation service which should narrow down your location enough, so that typing in the entire address is no longer necessary. I.e. using something like https://ipinfo.io/json and then typing in a full postcode and street name + number should work well in most cases.
IP geolocation is increasingly not useful for anything, especially for mobile users. The best it can do is give you the correct country and maybe get you in the right region.
If you're on cell service.. yeah probably less accurate. Not sure if it makes the form harder to fill out if you have to change some of the fields.
What I've started doing for my personal app though is I've added a "guess" button. It fills in the form using heuristics but it's opt in. Fills out like 10 fields automatically and I've tuned it so it's usually right, and when it isn't correcting a few is still quicker.
US-centric. I typed a Mexico postal code (it’s five digits) and got routed to somewhere in Maine. So - yeah the whole “I can tell you’re in the US just by the zip code” premise is entirely flawed.
E.g. trying to enter a Canadian postal code in a US zip code field fucks a lot of things up. Very frustrating for Canadians trying to buy gas in Washington when the pump asks for a zip.
> Fine, maybe country first
It's an example - limit typing. But adjust it to your own use case.
So I typed my zip code and got Winsconsin, and couldn't change the country to Greece, which is what my zip code actually is for. Proposing UX improvements is great, but please don't forget the other 95% of the planet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should be titled "Put the Zipcode and country first". Would be simple enough to have someone type the zip or postal code first, then move the countries that are known to have that zip code to the top of the drop down (still in alphabetical order), and all the other countries below that (also in alphabetical order). Leave all the fields editable, i.e. the postal code only suggests, ranks, or prepopulates. Seems like t…
Yeah. But also, are you ready to maintain a postcode to city mapping for every country you have a significant userbase in?
That gets around countries that consider their postal code database a licensed dataset.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother’s house is in the same boat. Unfortunately, not all ZIP codes exclusively belong to one city.
And boats can move from city to city!
> 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…
Also, don't be a dick. Have some empathy for your reader. Half of the UI designers you are talking to don't have a choice in how it works. Their colleagues chose some stupid framework which they can't customize. The other half didn't even want to do this task, they just got it assigned to them by some PM they don't respect (who, in turn, does not respect any advice coming from UI designers), and they are doing the minimum they possibly can while applying to other jobs that suck less.