Why Must I Still Fill Out My City, State, and Zip Code?
A pet peeve of mine for a long time has been telling a form my city, state, and zip code. If I am providing a zip code for an address in the United States, why should I be made to enter my city and select a state? The drop down select list for the state is especially annoying when navigating through a form using the tab key doesn't work correctly.
Sure, JavaScript enabled forms are somewhat new... but even the "Web 2.0" sites out there fail at this.
The usability complaint I have becomes even more apparent when I am filling out a form that validates my input. The common validation is for a shipping address where the system corrects the address to include the formal USPS spelling and the ZIP+4 code. These systems commonly make this validation an additional step in the process, which is far less annoying than having to enter the city and state. But these systems still force me to enter my city and state!
Enough already! There are free zip code databases available in CSV format. And for businesses that want to go the extra mile, there are pay databases that provide extra goodies like demographics. For this, check out ZipCodeWorld. ZipCodeWorld also has sample code to do things like calculate distances between locations for use in many programming languages - check out their developers area. ZipCodeWorld also has some foreign databases so there is no excuse to provide this feature for just users in America.
So please, make my life (and everyone's) a little bit easier by making your forms a little bit more intelligent. I do ask that you don't throw in some GeoIP to guess the location or limit users to use only their zip code to enter the location.
My last request with regards to forms requesting my location: Don't ask the question unless you're going to mail/ship me something. It's likely that I'll lie anyway.
June 9th, 2009 - 18:53
I agree with you on the state thing but the city is a little tricky. Unless the zip has the +4 extension on it you may overlap cities. Take my TOWN for example; the town of Sayville shares a zipcode with Fire Island Cherry Grove. I frequently get email addressed to me correctly but with the city (town) of Cherry Grove. No big deal you say (and neither do I) but the postal employees may especially if they are not really looking at the ZIP. This is of course only with the hand written mail that cannott go through the OCR for the zip and is automatically routed to the correct destination.
Be that as it may, this one piece of handwitten mail that is supposed to go over the Great South Bay via ferry ends up at my house and has to be redelivered (or vice-versa) may cost the post office much more than that little adhesive sticker in the top right hand corner.
June 30th, 2009 - 13:28
I had no idea that there were situations where towns shared zip codes… that makes absolutely no sense to me. But even so, the majority of addresses can be validated with the address line assuming there aren’t two addresses in the same zip code like 123 Main Street.
I live in Branford, CT (06405) which has several areas of town with their own name/post office. I live very close to the Stony Creek Post Office. Some people write “Stony Creek, CT 06405″ but the official town is still Branford.
The mail gets routed to the Stony Creek post office purely because of the street I live on (Buena Vista Rd).
I don’t know how common the Sayville/Cherry Grove situation is. In Los Angeles it was the opposite situation, there are a gazillion zip codes.
Bottom line, you can make most people happy if the form asks for your zip code and automatically guesses the city/state… folks that live in Cherry Grove can go in and edit the form to say Sayville if its wrong. They at least wont have to change their state from New York so it’s still saving the user time.