7 ms·

Why You Should Use a Text Area for Address Form Fields

16 points by dojosensei 8y ago

ryantbrown 8y ago
Changing the label from "Address 2" to "Apartment, Suite, etc (optional)" and adding dynamic dropdowns for City, State, Country decreased the number of incorrect addresses for us by nearly 50%. Although I can't claim credit I stole it from Shopify's checkout.
- dstroot 8y ago
  This approach seems best to me, rather than dealing with free form text and then trying to parse and cleanse that.
  - Doxin 8y ago
    > trying to parse and cleanse that But why would you? If you need to send something to the address you can just print the exact user input on the shipping label.
    - quelltext 8y ago
      You might wabt to run some analytics on your data based on city, general area, etc. Also simplifies fraud detection.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  > City, State, Country Not all countries have states.
olooney 8y ago
This is good advice, especially because anyone who is serious about using the address will be passing it through CASS certification or geocoding on the backend before using the address. Such APIs are fully capable of parsing the full address without you splitting the address lines. http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/geocoding-simple https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
paxy 8y ago
This is especially valid for forms that accept non-US addresses. It is such a pain to deal with assumed formats, length/charset limits or other restrictions put in place by devs who clearly have no idea how addresses work in other countries.
michaericalribo 8y ago
Yes, ‘two address lines’ is ad-hoc, but a user’s expectations may also not match the pattern: ‘a multi-line street number, name, apt #, etc; a zip; a city; a state.’ Should we get rid of auto-complete for state and city, using the zip, too, then? I don’t think so. But where to draw the distinction?
King-Aaron 8y ago
RIP devs that need to sanitize address data from random textarea inputs
egiboy 8y ago
It is virtually impossible to agree on a set of fields - there is always an exception: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
anotheryou 8y ago
until you need to integrate an api needing it seperated with a db full of free text

16 points by dojosensei 8y ago

Changing the label from "Address 2" to "Apartment, Suite, etc (optional)" and adding dynamic dropdowns for City, State, Country decreased the number of incorrect addresses for us by nearly 50%. Although I can't claim credit I stole it from Shopify's checkout.

dstroot 8y ago
This approach seems best to me, rather than dealing with free form text and then trying to parse and cleanse that.
- Doxin 8y ago
  > trying to parse and cleanse that But why would you? If you need to send something to the address you can just print the exact user input on the shipping label.
  - quelltext 8y ago
    You might wabt to run some analytics on your data based on city, general area, etc. Also simplifies fraud detection.
kwhitefoot 8y ago
> City, State, Country Not all countries have states.

olooney 8y ago

This is good advice, especially because anyone who is serious about using the address will be passing it through CASS certification or geocoding on the backend before using the address. Such APIs are fully capable of parsing the full address without you splitting the address lines. http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/geocoding-simple https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

paxy 8y ago

This is especially valid for forms that accept non-US addresses. It is such a pain to deal with assumed formats, length/charset limits or other restrictions put in place by devs who clearly have no idea how addresses work in other countries.

michaericalribo 8y ago

Yes, ‘two address lines’ is ad-hoc, but a user’s expectations may also not match the pattern: ‘a multi-line street number, name, apt #, etc; a zip; a city; a state.’ Should we get rid of auto-complete for state and city, using the zip, too, then? I don’t think so. But where to draw the distinction?

King-Aaron 8y ago

RIP devs that need to sanitize address data from random textarea inputs

egiboy 8y ago

It is virtually impossible to agree on a set of fields - there is always an exception: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

anotheryou 8y ago

until you need to integrate an api needing it seperated with a db full of free text