Hi Marcus, I think you should avoid anything that might stop the user flow through the form. Try not to prevent users from entering the address in the way they like.
If you are going to accept international addresses, the challenge is huge. Can you cope with different alphabets? You should be ready to take variations in spelling. If you don't, users may be unwilling to accept your version of the spelling. For example, I live in Sofia, Bulgaria. When I enter the city in www.typepal.com, I do it as Sofia and typepal suggests Sofija. I do not want to accept their spelling; however, I am not sure whether they will recognize the address if I enter it my way. If you have autosuggestions, you should let people enter the address in a way that differs from the autosuggestion. For example, www.geni.com (a genealogy application) deletes my entry for location if it does not match an exact value in their database. That's bad usability, especially for a genealogy app - location names might have changed in spelling and entirely over decades and centuries. If you validate the address, you need to find a meaningful way to let people know you have a problem with what they entered. For example, the demo at www.qas.com tells "No matches could be found. Please edit the address or accept it to use a the final address." This is not enough. What are the consequences? Will I still get my delivery? In many cases, there are two or more versions of an address depending on the local authority that maintains the database. For example, the utilities companies use one version of my address, and the municipality uses another. Applying the verification real time might be poor experience. You may consider asynchronous verification. Let users enter their data. On submit, accept everything and thank them. Then run your verification agent. If the agent finds discrepancies, let it suggest matches and send an email to the user letting her know and asking her to take some action. I have never seen this done, but think it might work. Best Dimiter Simov Lucrat Ltd. www.lucrat.net Netage Solutions Inc. www.netagesolutions.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=49422 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
