Re:Plenty Of Zip Codes For Form Auto-Completion
by fnordfnordfnord on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @09:31AM
(#4871036)
At least one user, me, is tired of your "typical UI paradigm" and tired of entering redundant information.
1. Ask for country (if not known) allow user to override if it was automatically detected.
2. Ask for zip, or other country specific postal code.
3. Look up zip. Fill form in with details.
Re:Plenty Of Zip Codes For Form Auto-Completion
by andrewaylett on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @02:35PM
(#4872804)
Many UK sites will start by asking for a postcode, which then lets them offer a drop-down of usually less than a dozen properties to fill in the rest of the address, guaranteed to be in standardised form.
The databases aren't always as complete as the developers believe them to be though -- sensible operators will leave a way to override the lookup, others lose out on custom from people living in new estates.
Re:Plenty Of Zip Codes For Form Auto-Completion
by epochwolf on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @11:13AM
(#4871557)
The solution is to ask for the zip code immediately after the street name. I work on insurance software and several of our applications do this.
Re:Plenty Of Zip Codes For Form Auto-Completion
by samirahmed on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @10:09AM
(#4871208)
We do support reverse city+state to zip lookup and lookup nearby zips for USA aswell
I've always wanted to use such a library for my checkout forms and whatnot, but unfortunately it doesn't fit the typical UI paradigm.
If you need the address info, you'll (almost) never ask for the zip code before the city and state, so the information has already been filled in before the user gets that far... and the country comes last.
Users are used to entering the address info in that natural order: street, city, state, zip, country (usually pre-set to your biggest userbase). I think the cognitive overhead of mixing that order up actually exceeds the effort of having them fill in all 3 fields.
The only place I could see you using something like this is if your are tailoring your services to a US-only userbase (so you can guarantee that a zip code is there and that the other info will not need to be manually entered). For example, we use ziptastic (at the server side for cross-domain reasons) at http://gastomorrow.com/ which is a US-only service to guess the price of gas tomorrow in your area.